FITSBLINK Program

Last updated June 6, 1999

Jure Skvarc has written a program to enable quick and easy visual comparison of two FITS images. Here's his short description:

Some of you may remember the Fitsblink program, made two years ago. I made some improvements and additions, so Fitsblink can do the following things now:

• load FITS images, which can also be compressed by either the compress or the gzip program;
• if the header contains correct WCS keywords, it will show celestial coordinates at the cursor position;
• pixel intensity can be represented either by grey levels or colors;
• it is possible to create star lists, import star lists and match them with a GSC or USNO SA catalog;
• it is possible to do astrometry and send results in MPC format directly from Fitsblink;
• as an experimental addition, it is possible to control CCD camera and telescope from it, but this requires some work from the user;
• and of course, you can still blink.

I would welcome bug reports, comments and suggestions.

From the June 6, 1999 message announcing version 3.1:

For people interested in astrometry and photometry I would like to announce version 3.1 of fitsblink.

It now includes higher order plate solutions, reports photometry in magnitudes, too, and has zoom and pan functions - suitable for people with large CCDs.

You can download the program in the RPM format (binary for Linux) and sources from URL

http://www-rcp.ijs.si/~jure/fitsblink/fitsblink.html

I welcome comments and bug reports.

Jure Skvarc
jure.skvarc@ijs.si

You can also find material at the TASS WWW site:

• download gzip'ed TAR file from TASS WWW site (1.5 MByte)
• download RPM file for Linux (includes binaries and installation script)

Note that in order to build the program from its source code, one must also have

• CFITSIO library for reading FITS files and
• XFORMS library for graphical user interface.

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