A native Swift library to read and write FITS files

Description

FITSCore is a pure Swift library to read, manipulate and write files conforming to the FITS 4.0 file format, commonly used to store astronomical data.

The aim is to implement a modern, native Swift library to utilize the full computing power of modern apple hardware. In particuary, I was seeking for a simple solution to read, render & review FITS files on an iPad.

FITSCore is the plattform independend base library. It compiles and runs on iOS / iPadOS / macCatalys as well as on Linux. Therefore the featureset is quite limited as the standard libraries on linux currently do not provide a lot of convenience for image generation. A deeper integration into the iOS enviornment and standard libaries is provided via the FITSKit library.

FITSCore	FITSKit	FITSTool
Fits file format read & write	Image rendering & manipulation	Command line tool
macOS, iOS & Linux	iOS / macCatalyst	Linux

Features

• Read & Write FITS 4.0 files
  • Reading files
  • Write Files
• FITS Extensions
  • Image Extensions
  • ASCII Table Extensions
  • Binary Table
• Native code
  • Swift 5.3
  • Compiles for macCatalyst
  • Compiles for iPadOS
  • Compiles for Linux

Getting started

Package Manager

With the swift package manager, add the library to your dependencies

dependencies: [
.package(url: "https://github.com/brampf/fitscore.git", from: "0.1.0")
]

then simply add the FITS import to your target

.target(name: "YourApp", dependencies: ["FITS"])

Documentation

• Introduction
• Working with Files
• Working with HDUs
• Working with Tables

TL;DR

Reading FITS Files

import FITS

/// Parste a FITS File
let fits = FitsFile.read(from: URL("/path/to/some/fits/file"))

Working with vector data

import FITS

// Fetch the whole image data
let image : Data = fits.prime.data(naxis: 1, dimension: 0)

// Fetch the read channel from the primary HDU
let red : Data = fits.prime.data(naxis: 3, dimension: 0)

Tests

There are various test cases implemented to verify compability with a variiety of real word examples of FITS files

License

MIT license; see LICENSE. (c) 2020