fits2hdf: a FITS to HDF5 conversion utility

• About fits2hdf
  • Motivation: why HDF5, and why not FITS?
  • The HDFITS specification
  • Alternatives
  • Copyright and referencing
• Getting started
  • Installation
  • Command line usage
  • Quickly adding HDF5 support in Python
  • Loading HDFITS files in python
• API

About fits2hdf

fits2hdf is a conversion to utility to port FITS files to and from Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5) files in the HDFITS format. In addition, there is a utility to port MeasurementSets (MS) to HDF5 files. This work was first presented at the ADASS XXIV conference in Calgary, 2014. A more complete overview is given in Astronomy & Computing.

The fits2hdf utility works by first mapping data from FITS/MS/HDF into an in-memory interchange format (IDI). fits2hdf is written in python and uses h5py, pyFits, and pyrap for file I/O.

fits2hdf is still under development, so should be considered an ‘alpha’ release that is likely to change. Community feedback is encouraged, and if you are interested in development please get in touch. This work is intended as a pathfinder toward getting astronomical data into a standardized HDF5 format, so that the advantages of HDF5 can be leveraged in the future.