What is dfitspy?

The full documentation can be found here: https://astrom-tom.github.io/dfitspy/build/html/index.html

The FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) is one of the most used format in astronomy [https://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_documentation.html]. It is used to store a lot of different types of data such as 1D or 2D spectra, 3D data cubes. The FITS files are built with two components. The data themselves are stored as tables and contains any types of data. Then a header is built containing set of keywords-value pairs aiming at describing the data themselves.

The present python module, dfitspy, is a small project that migrates the main dfits and fitsort capabilities to python [https://www.eso.org/sci/software/eclipse/eug/eug/node8.html]. It is a metadata searcher/displayer for FITS files. As dfits and fitsort, dfitspy is able to display in the terminal the result of a metadata search and is able to grep certain values of keywords inside large samples of files. Therefore it can be used directly with the command line interface. Nevertheless, dfitspy can be, and it is its strength, imported as a python module the user can use these functionnalities inside another python code or the python interpretor.

What is not dfitspy?

dfitspy does not read data inside fits file. Other libraries are doing this very efficiently and dfitspy is not made for that (see fitsio and astropy). It works only on the header and allows you to search/display the fits files header. It is also made to find common values in large amount of fits files in a very fast way.

Installation?

The last dfitspy version is v19.3.3 and is available in the pypi test repository. To install it::

 pip install dfitspy --user

Using this command will allow you not to have to install any other package. Pip will install what is missing for you.

Contribute! dfitspy is not perfect! It has been primarily developed for my private research and I decided to release in the spirit of making the research process as transparent as possible and in the hope it can be used by other people. If you have any comment or anything you would like to be added to dfitspy, or, even better, if you want to modify you can either do it yourself or please feel free to contact me! ---> the.spartan.proj@gmail.com

Copyright

dfitspy is a free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, version 3 of the License.

dfitspy is distributed without any warranty; without even the implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with the program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/ .

Disclaimer

dfitspy is not supported nor endorsed by the European Southern Observatory [ESO].

Acknowledgments

The python wrapper of the CFITSIO library have been made for the fitsio python library (https://github.com/esheldon/fitsio) and is used in dfitspy.