-- PaulGrenz - 07 Aug 2020

FITS files - What they are and why we use them

FITS stands for "Flexible Image Transport System" and is used as the standard image format by astronometrical institutions. You can read the specification here. The official website for the format is here.

All images acquired by LBTI are saved as FITS files which may contain 1 or more images. Each image (or more generically, dataset) is contained in an HDU (header-data unit). Each HDU contains a header which describes the data (or image). The whole file is comprised of blocks which are all 2880 bytes in size; this metric is very useful in transporting the images, which we will discuss in a later topic.

When writing FITS files to disk file (or memory file), we use a standard library to do so. This libray is called "cfitsio" and can be found here.