[fitsbits] HST, HDFS, FITS, CFITSIO, and GEIS

[William Pence]

Adam,

CFITSIO is a subroutine interface that can be used to read FITS files
(including the WFPC2 data) if you are writing your own C or Fortran programs. 
IRAF/STSDAS on the other hand is a higher level package of complete programs
that perform various operations on the data files. The  "archival FITS format"
is not anything special; these files should conform to the FITS standard. 
Regarding GEIS formats, I believe most IRAF/STSDAS tasks can read FITS format
files directly so it is probably not necessary to convert them to GEIS first.

-Bill Pence
-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                          pence at tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662         HEASARC         +1-301-286-4599 (voice)     
Greenbelt MD 20771                         +1-301-286-1684 (fax)

adm wrote:
> 
> I'm an undergrad trying to work with HDF South data from WFPC2.  I know
> the datasets for this instrument are processed in an archival FITS
> format, and then need to be converted to GEIS to be played with in
> IRAF/STSDAS, but what about using CFITSIO to look at these data?  Is
> this "archival FITS format" a special kind of FITS?  If so, can CFITSIO
> reliably look at these images?  If it cannot, do I convert them to GEIS
> and then back to regular FITS in order to use CFITSIO?