Working with fits files

As I had mentioned, much much earlier, almost all data files, be it photometric or spectroscopic data, are stored in .fits format. The pyfits library or the astropy library can be used to read and write such files in python and the cfitsio library can be used to work on them in C. As part of a small workshop on astronomical data analysis, I showed students how astropy can be used to extract data from .fits files, containing information about the spectrum of an astronomical object. You can find the relevant fits files, ipython notebook and a html version of the ipynb on my github repository. I shall include data regarding image fits files tomorrow.

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