[fitsbits] current FITS toolkits ? {External}

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

Hi Rob,

GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro) is a command-line utility with many 
command-line programs (fully written in C, directly using CFITSIO+WCSLIB 
as a back-end) for reading/writing FITS files in many scenarios 
necessary for astronimical data reduction:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro

This is the list of command-line programs that it provides (with a short 
description of each):

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html

For the particular question you mentioned, you can use the "Crop" 
program (to separate each observed region from the pre/over-scans and 
other amplifiers for example) and the "Arithmetic" program (for 
stitching them into one full image without the pre/over-scans). In fact, 
there is a fully working example for this scenario in the documentation 
of the 'stitch' operator of the Arithmetic program (you should just 
change the values to '--section' based on your camera):

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dimensionality-changing-operators.html

If you use these in a Makefile instead of a simple shell script, you can 
even parallelize the calls to 'astcrop' over all exposures and all 
amplifiers and speed up the job significantly. Make has wonderful 
parallelization and workflow orchestration capabilities which we 
extensively use in our FITS processing with Gnuastro.

For a general hands-on tutorial to Gnuastro's command-line tools, we 
have this section of the manual:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnuastro/manual/html_node/General-program-usage-tutorial.html

You can also watch this video tutorial that we presented in last year's 
ADASS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iukkBV-EBbM

Cheers,
Mohammad



On 9/26/22 07:03, Seaman, Robert Lewis - (rseaman) via fitsbits wrote:
> Howdy,
> 
> Do folks have suggestions (or pointers to lists) of current (I guess that means supported) FITS tools and libraries? I’m about to write yet another IRAF script to repackage a new (to me) camera format by shuffling extensions and overscans. But I must wonder if by this point somebody has written what really seems like a general purpose command line tool of community interest.
> 
> Montage didn’t want to build for me, but I think it’s similar to swarp which we use for various reprojection tasks. Right at the moment, I’m looking for something more basic to just shuffle rectangular arrays of pixels. It seems worth checking every five years or so.
> 
> Rob Seaman
> Catalina Sky Survey
> University of Arizona
> 
> 
> 
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