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| CFITSIO | |
|---|---|
| Name | CFITSIO |
| Developer | NASA/HEASARC |
| Released | 1990s |
| Latest release | see project site |
| Operating system | Unix-like, Windows, macOS |
| License | open source |
CFITSIO is a library for reading and writing data in the Flexible Image Transport System widely used in astronomy and space science. It provides portable, high-performance I/O for image, table, and header data used by projects at NASA, European Space Agency, CERN, National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, and university observatories. CFITSIO underpins pipelines and analysis tools developed for missions such as Hubble Space Telescope, Chandra X-ray Observatory, XMM-Newton, Spitzer Space Telescope, and ground facilities including Very Large Array and Atacama Large Millimeter Array.
CFITSIO implements the FITS standard formalized by the International Astronomical Union and maintained by the NASA Astrophysics Data System and archival centers like HEASARC and MAST. The library exposes a C API optimized for handling the FITS format defined in records and keywords compatible with archives at European Southern Observatory, Space Telescope Science Institute, and national data centers such as IPAC. CFITSIO is widely used by software projects including FTOOLS, DS9, IRAF, Astropy, TOPCAT, and instrument pipelines for Keck Observatory and Subaru Telescope.
CFITSIO supports multi-dimensional images, ASCII and binary tables, and extensions conforming to conventions used by Sloan Digital Sky Survey and Gaia data releases. It implements compression schemes and tile-compressed images used in missions like WISE and Kepler, and supports data types ranging from 8-bit integers to 64-bit IEEE floating point used in Planck and WMAP products. The library provides error handling, header keyword manipulation, and metadata operations compatible with standards at IVOA and interchange formats used by NOAO and ALMA archives. CFITSIO also offers utilities for contiguous and random access I/O, enabling integration with visualization tools such as AIPS, Karma, and Glue.
The architecture centers on a C runtime implementing buffered I/O, header parsing, and HDU (Header/Data Unit) management consistent with the FITS canonical layout specified by the FITS Support Office and standards committees at IAU Commission 5. CFITSIO maps file offsets for image tiles, binary table columns, and variable-length array data used in surveys like Pan-STARRS and LSST. It interoperates with filesystem technologies including NFS, Lustre, and Amazon S3 when used via gateway tools in observatory archives. The API abstracts endian issues relevant to Intel and ARM architectures and integrates with compression libraries such as zlib and Blosc employed in high-throughput environments at CERN computing centers.
Although written in C, CFITSIO provides bindings and wrappers used by projects in multiple languages: Fortran interfaces used in legacy pipelines at JPL and Caltech; Python wrappers used by Astropy and SciPy; Perl modules adopted by data reduction scripts in observatories like McDonald Observatory; Java bindings used in visualization tools at STScI; and IDL interfaces common in solar physics groups at Lockheed Martin Solar and Astrophysics Laboratory. Integration layers exist for C++ toolkits such as ROOT and Qt applications like DS9, which pair CFITSIO I/O with GUI components for image inspection.
CFITSIO development originated with engineers at NASA/GSFC and has evolved through collaboration with archival institutions including HEASARC and international partners at ESA and JAXA. Major milestones include support for binary table conventions adopted during the 1990s FITS standardization, addition of compression and tiled image support aligned with missions in the 2000s, and modernized thread-safety and large-file support addressing needs for projects like Gaia and LSST in the 2010s. Maintenance releases and patches are coordinated with software ecosystems used by CFD and data centers at NOIRLab, ensuring compatibility with compilers from GCC and Clang and CI systems common at research institutions.
CFITSIO is embedded in astronomical data reduction pipelines at institutions such as Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, University of Cambridge astrophysics groups, and survey projects including SDSS, DES, and Euclid. It is used for producing science-ready products for spectrographs on Gemini Observatory, radio imaging from VLA, and time-domain photometry from TESS and Kepler. Data centers employ CFITSIO to validate FITS headers, reformat archives for VO services hosted by ESAC and CADC, and serve cutout services integrated with tools like Aladin.
CFITSIO is distributed under an open-source license approved for widespread use by research institutions including NASA and ESA archives. Binary packages are maintained in operating system repositories provided by Debian, Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Homebrew for macOS, while source distributions are mirrored by institutional mirrors at HEASARC and community repositories used by research groups at CERN and university IT departments. The permissive licensing model facilitates incorporation into commercial products from vendors collaborating with observatories such as Ball Aerospace and Northrop Grumman.
Category:Astronomy software