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FITS-WCS and related software

Several implementations of the FITS WCS standards are available:

- The WCSLIB software distribution (i.e. this library) may be obtained from http://www.atnf.csiro.au/computing/software/wcs. The remainder of this manual describes its use.

  WCSLIB is included in the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL https://ascl.net) as record ascl:1108.003 (https://ascl.net/1108.003), and in the Astrophysics Data System (ADS https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu) with bibcode 2011ascl.soft08003C (https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ascl.soft08003C).

- wcstools, developed by Jessica Mink, may be obtained from http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/wcstools/.

  ASCL: https://ascl.net/1109.015
  ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ascl.soft09015M

- AST, developed by David Berry within the U.K. Starlink project, http://www.starlink.ac.uk/ast/ and now supported by JAC, Hawaii http://starlink.jach.hawaii.edu/starlink/. A useful utility for experimenting with FITS WCS descriptions (similar to wcsgrid) is also provided; go to the above site and then look at the section entitled "FITS-WCS Plotting Demo".

  ASCL: https://ascl.net/1404.016
  ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2014ascl.soft04016B

- SolarSoft, http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/solarsoft/, primarily an IDL-based system for analysis of Solar physics data, contains a module written by Bill Thompson oriented towards Solar coordinate systems, including spectral, http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/solarsoft/gen/idl/wcs/.

  ASCL: https://ascl.net/1208.013
  ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012ascl.soft08013F

- The IDL Astronomy Library, http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/, contains an independent implementation of FITS-WCS in IDL by Rick Balsano, Wayne Landsman and others. See http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/contents.html#C5.

Python wrappers to WCSLIB are provided by

- The Kapteyn Package http://www.astro.rug.nl/software/kapteyn/ by Hans Terlouw and Martin Vogelaar.

  ASCL: https://ascl.net/1611.010
  ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2016ascl.soft11010T

- pywcs, http://stsdas.stsci.edu/astrolib/pywcs/ by Michael Droettboom, which is distributed within Astropy, https://www.astropy.org.

  ASCL (Astropy): https://ascl.net/1304.002
  ADS (Astropy): https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2013ascl.soft04002G

Java is supported via

- CADC/CCDA Java Native Interface (JNI) bindings to WCSLIB 4.2 http://www.cadc-ccda.hia-iha.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/cadc/source/ by Patrick Dowler.

and Javascript by

- wcsjs, https://github.com/astrojs/wcsjs, a port created by Amit Kapadia using Emscripten, an LLVM to Javascript compiler. wcsjs provides a code base for running WCSLIB on web browsers.

Julia wrappers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_(programming_language)) are provided by

- WCS.jl, https://github.com/JuliaAstro/WCS.jl, a component of Julia Astro, https://github.com/JuliaAstro.

An interface for the R programming language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R_(programming_language)) is available at

- Rwcs, https://github.com/asgr/Rwcs/ by Aaron Robotham.

Recommended WCS-aware FITS image viewers:

- Bill Joye's DS9, http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9/, and

  ASCL: https://ascl.net/0003.002
  ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000ascl.soft03002S

- Fv by Pan Chai, http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftools/fv/.

  ASCL: https://ascl.net/1205.005
  ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012ascl.soft05005P

both handle 2-D images.

Currently (2013/01/29) I know of no image viewers that handle 1-D spectra properly nor multi-dimensional data, not even multi-dimensional data with only two non-degenerate image axes (please inform me if you know otherwise).

Pre-built WCSLIB packages are available, generally a little behind the main release (this list will probably be stale by the time you read it, best do a web search):

- archlinux (tgz), https://www.archlinux.org/packages/extra/i686/wcslib.
- Debian (deb), http://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=wcslib.
- Fedora (RPM), https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgdb/package/wcslib.
- Fresh Ports (RPM), http://www.freshports.org/astro/wcslib.
- Gentoo, http://packages.gentoo.org/package/sci-astronomy/wcslib.
- Homebrew (MacOSX), https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-science.
- RPM (general) http://rpmfind.net/linux/rpm2html/search.php?query=wcslib, http://www.rpmseek.com/rpm-pl/wcslib.html.
- Ubuntu (deb), https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/wcslib.

Bill Pence's general FITS IO library, CFITSIO is available from http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/. It is used optionally by some of the high-level WCSLIB test programs and is required by two of the utility programs.

ASCL: https://ascl.net/1010.001
ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2010ascl.soft10001P

PGPLOT, Tim Pearson's Fortran plotting package on which PGSBOX is based, also used by some of the WCSLIB self-test suite and a utility program, is available from http://astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot/.

ASCL: https://ascl.net/1103.002
ADS: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2011ascl.soft03002P