5.1 Fits ¶

The “Flexible Image Transport System”, or FITS, is by far the most common data container format in astronomy and in constant use since the 1970s. Archiving (future usage, simplicity) has been one of the primary design principles of this format. In the last few decades it has proved so useful and robust that the Vatican Library has also chosen FITS for its “long-term digital preservation” project¹²⁸.

Although the full name of the standard invokes the idea that it is only for images, it also contains complete and robust features for tables. It started off in the 1970s and was formally published as a standard in 1981, it was adopted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 1982 and an IAU working group to maintain its future was defined in 1988. The FITS 2.0 and 3.0 standards were approved in 2000 and 2008 respectively, and the 4.0 draft has also been released recently, please see the FITS standard document web page for the full text of all versions. Also see the FITS 3.0 standard paper for a nice introduction and history along with the full standard.

Many common image formats, for example, a JPEG, only have one image/dataset per file, however one great advantage of the FITS standard is that it allows you to keep multiple datasets (images or tables along with their separate meta-data) in one file. In the FITS standard, each data + metadata is known as an extension, or more formally a header data unit or HDU. The HDUs in a file can be completely independent: you can have multiple images of different dimensions/sizes or tables as separate extensions in one file. However, while the standard does not impose any constraints on the relation between the datasets, it is strongly encouraged to group data that are contextually related with each other in one file. For example, an image and the table/catalog of objects and their measured properties in that image. Other examples can be images of one patch of sky in different colors (filters), or one raw telescope image along with its calibration data (tables or images).

As discussed above, the extensions in a FITS file can be completely independent. To keep some information (meta-data) about the group of extensions in the FITS file, the community has adopted the following convention: put no data in the first extension, so it is just meta-data. This extension can thus be used to store Meta-data regarding the whole file (grouping of extensions). Subsequent extensions may contain data along with their own separate meta-data. All of Gnuastro’s programs also follow this convention: the main output dataset(s) are placed in the second (or later) extension(s). The first extension contains no data the program’s configuration (input file name, along with all its option values) are stored as its meta-data, see Output FITS files.

The meta-data contain information about the data, for example, which region of the sky an image corresponds to, the units of the data, what telescope, camera, and filter the data were taken with, it observation date, or the software that produced it and its configuration. Without the meta-data, the raw dataset is practically just a collection of numbers and really hard to understand, or connect with the real world (other datasets). It is thus strongly encouraged to supplement your data (at any level of processing) with as much meta-data about your processing/science as possible.

The meta-data of a FITS file is in ASCII format, which can be easily viewed or edited with a text editor or on the command-line. Each meta-data element (known as a keyword generally) is composed of a name, value, units and comments (the last two are optional). For example, below you can see three FITS meta-data keywords for specifying the world coordinate system (WCS, or its location in the sky) of a dataset:

LATPOLE =           -27.805089 / [deg] Native latitude of celestial pole
RADESYS = 'FK5'                / Equatorial coordinate system
EQUINOX =               2000.0 / [yr] Equinox of equatorial coordinates

However, there are some limitations which discourage viewing/editing the keywords with text editors. For example, there is a fixed length of 80 characters for each keyword (its name, value, units and comments) and there are no new-line characters, so on a text editor all the keywords are seen in one line. Also, the meta-data keywords are immediately followed by the data which are commonly in binary format and will show up as strange looking characters on a text editor, and significantly slowing down the processor.

Gnuastro’s Fits program was designed to allow easy manipulation of FITS extensions and meta-data keywords on the command-line while conforming fully with the FITS standard. For example, you can copy or cut (copy and remove) HDUs/extensions from one FITS file to another, or completely delete them. It also has features to delete, add, or edit meta-data keywords within one HDU.

• Invoking Fits