[fitsbits] convert to FITS format

[Tom Kuiper]

> Date: Fri, 28 Jul 2000 19:08:36 GMT
> From: jack_1236 at hotmail.com
> Organization: Deja.com - Before you buy.
> Subject: [fitsbits] convert to FITS format
> Newsgroups: sci.astro.fits
...
> Our PC development tools create binary files that we like to conver
> them to FITS format to view. Could someone there tell us what we
> should do in order to start the process.

I have found fitsTcl very effective and adopted it for our work.  You can
see a locally modified version of the fitsTcl User's Guide at
http://DSNra.jpl.nasa.gov/pkg/fitsTcl-2.002/html/fitsTcl/
Our 'examplse' at
http://DSNra.jpl.nasa.gov/pkg/fitsTcl-2.002/html/fitsTcl/examples.html
will give you a quick start.

If you don't like Tcl, or it isn't suitable for integrating into your
software, this package and examples may still give you an insight into the
unlying CFitsIO C-library.  You can find this at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/fits.html
along with lots of other useful stuff.
> 
> The pixels are 16 bit. The file is binary. First tiw bytes (integer)
> show the width of the image and the second two bytes  (integer) show
> the length of the image.
> 
Straight forward. See our examples under "Creating FITS Files", and in
particular the discussion around the command
% fitsObj1 insert image -p 16 3 {256 1 1}
In your case, it would look something like
  fitsObj1 insert image -p 16 2 {width length}

Good luck.

Tom
--
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