RFITSIO: FITS reading for R and S-Plus

RFITSIO is a C library for use with the R and S-Plus environments for reading FITS files. RFITSIO actually is a wrapper to CFITSIO library a C library for the manipulation of FITS images, so you need both of them to successfully parse FITS images from R or S-Plus. RFITSIO has been compiled as a DLL (Dynamic-Link Library) using MS Visual C++ 6.0 but is written in strait C so it portable to other systems with a simple recompilation. Currently RFITSIO supports only two functions: RFitsio_GetSize() and RFitsio_ReadImage(). RFitsio_GetSize() takes a filename as input and gives you the number of pixels, width and height of the image. RFitsio_ReadImage() takes the filename and the number of pixels of an image and fills a one dimensional array with the image data. To make the use of RFITSIO easier from R/S-Plus four script functions have been implemented: FITSGetWidth(), FITSGetHeight(), FITSGetSize(), FITSReadImage(). All four functions take as a parameter a filename and they contained in four separated *.txt files: FITSGetWidth.txt, FITSGetHeight.txt, FITSGetSize.txt, and FITSReadImage.txt.

Using RFITSIO from R

First you need to load the cfitsio.dll and then the rfistio.dll because rfistio.dll requires the cfitsio.dll to be loaded first. Suppose you placed all the required DLLs and scripts to the C:\TEMP directory. To load the two DLLs do the following:

dyn.load("C:/TEMP/cfitsio.dll") and press <RETURN>

dyn.load("C:/TEMP/rfitsio.dll") and press <RETURN>

To load the four scripts files do the following (there is no any particular order required to load them):

source("C:/TEMP/ FITSGetWidth.txt") and press <RETURN>

source("C:/TEMP/ FITSGetHeight.txt") and press <RETURN>

source("C:/TEMP/ FITSGetSize.txt") and press <RETURN>

source("C:/TEMP/ FITSReadImage.txt") and press <RETURN>

Downloads

rfitsio.zip contains DLLs and script files: rfitsio.dll, cfitsio.dll, FITSGetWidth.txt, FITSGetHeight.txt, FITSGetSize.txt, and FITSReadImage.txt.

rfitsio.cpp download the C source code for the library. To successfully compile it you will need the CFITSIO library as well.