This document is intended to help you quickly start writing C programs to read and write FITS files using the CFITSIO library. It covers the most important CFITSIO routines that are needed to perform most types of operations on FITS files. For more complete information about these and all the other available routines in the library please refer to the “CFITSIO User’s Reference Guide”, which is available from the CFITSIO Web site at http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio.
For more general information about the FITS data format, refer to the following web page: http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/fits.html
FITS stands for Flexible Image Transport System and is the standard file format used to store most astronomical data files. There are 2 basic types of FITS files: images and tables. FITS images often contain a 2-dimensional array of pixels representing an image of a piece of the sky, but FITS images can also contain 1-D arrays (i.e, a spectrum or light curve), or 3-D arrays (a data cube), or even higher dimensional arrays of data. An image may also have zero dimensions, in which case it is referred to as a null or empty array. The supported datatypes for the image arrays are 8, 16, and 32-bit integers, and 32 and 64-bit floating point real numbers. Both signed and unsigned integers are supported.
FITS tables contain rows and columns of data, similar to a spreadsheet. All the values in a particular column must have the same datatype. A cell of a column is not restricted to a single number, and instead can contain an array or vector of numbers. There are actually 2 subtypes of FITS tables: ASCII and binary. As the names imply, ASCII tables store the data values in an ASCII representation whereas binary tables store the data values in a more efficient machine-readable binary format. Binary tables are generally more compact and support more features (e.g., a wider range of datatypes, and vector columns) than ASCII tables.
A single FITS file many contain multiple images or tables. Each table or image is called a Header-Data Unit, or HDU. The first HDU in a FITS file must be an image (but it may have zero axes) and is called the Primary Array. Any additional HDUs in the file (which are also referred to as ‘extensions’) may contain either an image or a table.
Every HDU contains a header containing keyword records. Each keyword record is 80 ASCII characters long and has the following format:
KEYWORD = value / comment string
The keyword name can be up to 8 characters long (all uppercase). The value can be either an integer or floating point number, a logical value (T or F), or a character string enclosed in single quotes. Each header begins with a series of required keywords to describe the datatype and format of the following data unit, if any. Any number of other optional keywords can be included in the header to provide other descriptive information about the data. For the most part, the CFITSIO routines automatically write the required FITS keywords for each HDU, so you, the programmer, usually do not need to worry about them.