CFITSIO
Why?
Obtaining
FITS Home

CfitsioSvc Package

Introduction

A GLAST-defined service, providing an interface to the standard cfitsio library.

CFITSIO

We use cfitsio as our external library providing access to the routines necessary to manipulate FITS files.

Why cfitsio?

There are a number of libraries available for FITS I/O, including a new library called ccfits written in C++.  Why, then, are we using the cfitsio library?  Here are some of the reasons:

1. ccfits requires >= gcc 2.95, which we do not yet support
2. ccfits does not compile using VC++ 6.0
   It does compile with Visual .Net - however there is a runtime error, seemingly in a Microsoft system library.
   NOTE:  ccfits will compile using cygwin.

So, we will use cfitsio for now, in the future, we will likely upgrade our interface to use both Gaudi's persistency mechanism and to use the higher level ccfits library.

Obtaining cfitsio and its interface package

We use the current cfitsio release v2.410.  Binaries for both Windows and RedHat Linux are available from the SLAC SAS FTP area:
ftp://ftp-glast.slac.stanford.edu/glast.u05/extlib/cfitsio

Download the appropriate binaries and extract the file into your $GLAST_EXT directory.

Next install the cfitstio interface package, v0r2, now available in the SLAC CVS repository.

Windows

• Using VCMT, click the checkout button
  • The name is "cfitsio"
  • Revision is v0r2
  • Choose the directory, in your CMTPATH, where you want the package installed
  • Leave the version text box blank
• With the cfitsio package highlighted in the package list, build test_cfitsio.exe - app
• Click the run button, to execute the test program.

UNIX

• Using glastpack, create a new directory:
  glastpack.pl create cfits
• Enter the new cfits directory and login using glastpack:
  glastpack.pl login
• Using glastpack, checkout cfitsio:
  glastpack.pl rco cfitsio v0r2
• Build the test routine, using glastpack:
  glastpack.pl build cfitsio v0r2
• Now run the test routine, using glastpack:
  glastpack.pl run cfitsio v0r2 test_cfitsio.exe

FITS

For further information about FITS, please see the following web page:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/fits.html

The CfitsioSvc package