FITS Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) format

Extensions: .fits, .fit, .fts

Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy.

This format requires the astropy package.

Parameters for reading

cache : bool
If the file name is a URL, ~astropy.utils.data.download_file is used to open the file. This specifies whether or not to save the file locally in Astropy’s download cache (default: True).
uint : bool

Interpret signed integer data where BZERO is the central value and BSCALE == 1 as unsigned integer data. For example, int16 data with BZERO = 32768 and BSCALE = 1 would be treated as uint16 data.

Note, for backward compatibility, the kwarg uint16 may be used instead. The kwarg was renamed when support was added for integers of any size.

ignore_missing_end : bool
Do not issue an exception when opening a file that is missing an END card in the last header.
checksum : bool or str
If True, verifies that both DATASUM and CHECKSUM card values (when present in the HDU header) match the header and data of all HDU’s in the file. Updates to a file that already has a checksum will preserve and update the existing checksums unless this argument is given a value of ‘remove’, in which case the CHECKSUM and DATASUM values are not checked, and are removed when saving changes to the file.
disable_image_compression : bool, optional
If True, treats compressed image HDU’s like normal binary table HDU’s.
do_not_scale_image_data : bool
If True, image data is not scaled using BSCALE/BZERO values when read.
ignore_blank : bool
If True, the BLANK keyword is ignored if present.
scale_back : bool
If True, when saving changes to a file that contained scaled image data, restore the data to the original type and reapply the original BSCALE/BZERO values. This could lead to loss of accuracy if scaling back to integer values after performing floating point operations on the data.