New CFITSIO Release

[William Pence]

                      New Release of CFITSIO 1.30
                      ---------------------------
                            11 Sept 1997

A new release of the CFITSIO C library for reading and writing FITS
format data files is now available.  The main new features in this
release are:

1  FITS files may be read and written in memory (including shared memory
   and memory-mapped files).  Since the I/O speed for files in memory is
   much faster than for magnetic disk files, this feature may improve 
   the performance of I/O intensive tasks.

2  In a related development, CFITSIO can now read FITS files piped in
   on the 'stdin' stream and write them out to the 'stdout' stream.
   Simply specify the FITS file name as "-" when opening or creating the
   file to read from stdin or write to stdout, respectively.  Using this
   mechanism to pass FITS files between processes via pipes instead of
   creating intermediate disk files may provide a simple means of
   speeding up processing pipelines.

3  Two new routines were added to read and write the keyword unit
   string, using a convention of enclosing the unit string in square
   brackets at the start of the keyword comment field, as in this
   example:

   VELOCITY=               66.5 / [km/s] radial velocity of object

4  Improved the support for null-valued keywords, i.e., keywords
   that have an 'equals sign' in column 9 but have a blank
   value field, as in this example:

   KEYWORD =                     / the value is undefined

See the CFITSIO User's Guide for more details on these new features.

CFITSIO is available from: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio
or by anonymous ftp from: legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov in the /software/fitsio
subdirectory.

_________________________________________________________________________ 
William Pence
HEASARC - High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
NASA/GSFC
e-mail: pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov
phone: (301)286-4599