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FTOOLS: A general package of software to manipulate FITS files
The FTOOLS Team
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Abstract:
FTOOLS, a highly modular collection of
utilities for processing and analyzing data in the
FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) format,
has been developed in support of the
HEASARC (High Energy Astrophysics
Research Archive Center) at
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.
The FTOOLS package contains many utility programs which
perform modular tasks on any FITS image or table,
as well as higher-level analysis programs designed
specifically for data from current and past high energy
astrophysics missions.
The utility programs for FITS tables are especially
rich and powerful, and provide functions for
presentation of file contents, extraction of
specific rows or columns, appending or merging tables,
binning values in a column or selecting subsets of rows based
on a boolean expression.
Individual FTOOLS programs can easily be chained together
in scripts to achieve more complex operations such as the
generation and displaying of spectra or light curves.
FTOOLS development began in 1991 and has produced the main
set of data analysis software for the current
ASCA and
RXTE space missions
and for other archival sets of X-ray and gamma-ray data.
The FTOOLS software package is supported on most
UNIX platforms and on Windows 98/NT machines.
The user interface is controlled by standard parameter
files that are very similar to those used by
IRAF.
The package is self documenting through a stand alone
help task called fhelp.
Software is written in
ANSI
C and FORTRAN to provide
portability across most computer systems.
The data format dependencies
between hardware platforms are isolated through the
FITSIO library package.
Subject headings: methods: data analysis, techniques: image processing,
X-rays: general
Latest Version: 4.2 (1998 December 10)
Archived: 1999 December 17
Papers: multiple, representative:
Cagnoni, I., della Ceca, R. & Maccacaro, T., 1998ApJ...493...54C
Languages: C, FORTRAN
External Explanatory Pages:
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/ftools/ftools_menu.html
Source Code: multiple, representative:
ftools.v4.2.tar.gz