[fitsbits] Re: fits converter -> BMP/JPG code

[Clive Page]

In article <e0b344df.0305072229.39ff27e1 at posting.google.com>,
Darrell Porcello <porcello at uclink.berkeley.edu> wrote:

>I was looking for a source for code that would take most fits images,
>parse out its header and convert the image into a BMP or JPG format.
>Freeware of pay, it doesn't matter. I have found lots of fits readers
>and converters, but none really work for my purposes.

Others have given you some suggestions.  But I'd like to point out an
inherent problem in that FITS images don't contain a colour table
(normally).  If you want to convert it to something which can be shown on a
screen you have to supply some sort of mapping from the internal numbers
(integers, reals, or whatever) to colours on the screen.  That means
choosing the range of values to represent (with images of the sky it often
helps to ignore the extremes of the distribution) and map them to a
sensible table of colours (greyscale, rainbow, heat, or whatever...).


-- 
Clive Page   cgp <at sign> le.ac.uk