FITS Format Support for GDAL

[Simon Perkins]

Hi,

I've just CVS committed support for the FITS format in GDAL. The meat of
it is in the frmts/fits directory. From the documentation:

--

FITS -- Flexible Image Transport System

FITS is a format used mainly by astronomers, but it is a relatively
simple format that supports arbitrary image types and multi-spectral
images, and so has found its way into GDAL. FITS support is implemented
in terms of the standard CFITSIO library, which you must have on your
system in order for FITS support to be enabled. Both reading and writing
of FITS files is supported. At the current time, no support for a
georeferencing system is implemented, but WCS (World Coordinate System)
support is possible in the future. 

NOTE: Implemented as gdal/frmts/fits/fitsdataset.cpp.

--

configure looks for cfitsio on your system, and disables FITS support if
you don't have it.

If you get a chance to use the module and find it doesn't work quite as
advertized, please send bug reports to me. Frank, is there a way of
making Bugzilla do this?

One extra thing I hope to add in the very near future is a way of
reading and _writing_ arbitrary meta information from/to the FITS file
header.


It was a pleasure adding a module to such a well designed piece of
software. Thanks to Frank for making it all possible!


Cheers,

Sy