FITS software recommendations

[jnb]

I've had a little bit of a play with the Bradford Robotic Telescope and got a not bad image of NGC1042. Or at least when I look at the image as they processed it it's not too bad if I download the FITS data and try to process it myself I find it very difficult to get anything sensible. Most of that is going to be down to me not knowing how to drive the software but before I go too far with what I'm doing are there any particularly recommended FITS packages?

I'm currently using fv5.3 which seems to have lots of interesting tools but a rather klunky interface.

and for what it's worth this is the image that I got from BRT

But I can't get the downloaded data to show anything like that detail.

[rfdesigner]

Most astro programs can cope with FITS, even if they don't work in FITS natively

I like IRIS ( http://www.astrosurf.com/~buil/us/iris/iris.htm ) which uses signed 16 bit values and loads/saves in FITS natively and is free, can import from most other variants. PixInsight can cope with anything pretty much but isn't free.

There are many more.

Derek

[andrewluck]

I suggest starting with FITS Liberator, http://www.spacetelescope.org/projects/fits_liberator/

Andrew