FITS header field names

[Martin Meredith]

The FITS standard https://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/standard40/fits_standard40aa-le.pdf mandates and reserves a number of field names for the header of a FITS format file, but the keywords are quite limited and any software that writes FITS headers can extend them ad infinitum.

Does anyone know if there are any conventions for field names in astronomy software?

I've looked at a couple of well-known AP programs and find that there are different field names used to signify the same thing e.g. EXPOSURE and EXPTIME, CREATOR and SWCREATE, etc. So it seems the answer to my question is probably no. But I'd be interested to hear from people about this. My use case is in developing software that can process FITS coming from a variety of capture engines, and I'd prefer not to have to know about each capture engine's header conventions in advance.

cheers

Martin 

 

[andrew s]

Try here https://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_dictionary.html .

But there is no fixed use beyond the mandatory fields .

Regards Andrew

Edited October 26, 2020 by andrew s

[Martin Meredith]

Thanks Andrew. That's the list I was looking at too (its in the appendix of the pdf). I was hoping perhaps there would be some agreed conventions for simple stuff like what filter was used etc but apparently not. 

 

[andrew s]

1 hour ago, Martin Meredith said:

Thanks Andrew. That's the list I was looking at too (its in the appendix of the pdf). I was hoping perhaps there would be some agreed conventions for simple stuff like what filter was used etc but apparently not. 

 

I think the most common use might be from The Sky X and MaxImDL if your mainly interested in amateur imaging. 

I am currently playing with astropy and anoconda/spider to do 3D plots of my Flare Star spectra. As this is new to me just find the data was a challenge! Now just have to reconstruct the wavelength scale and master plotting.

Good luck with your work.

Regards Andrew

[Martin Meredith]

I'm also using astropy for this FITs stuff too. It makes it very easy to handle headers/data at least for standard images (I've not looked at tabular data using astropy).

I was also using astropy for coordinate conversion, transits, solar altitude and the like until recently but it does insist on connecting to NASA every few days to update the time to nearest picosecond or something -- so beware! In the end I recoded it using Meeus's Astronomical Algorithms (which I think is probably the basis for the astropy code anyway).

In case it helps, there is a great resource on data science in python written by an astrophysicist, available as Jupyter notebooks here: https://github.com/jakevdp It isn't datascience for astrophysics though, but it might be useful when getting data into various formats using python.

cheers

Martin