What does FITS mean in Universities?

This page is about the meanings of the acronym/abbreviation/shorthand FITS in the Academic & Science field in general and in the Universities terminology in particular.

Faculty Instructional Technology Support

Academic & Science » Universities


Find a translation for FITS in other languages:

Select another language:


What does FITS mean?

Flexible Image Transport System 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. Unlike many image formats, FITS is designed specifically for scientific data and hence includes many provisions for describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata. The FITS format was first standardized in 1981; it has evolved gradually since then, and the most recent version was standardized in 2008. FITS was designed with an eye towards long-term archival storage, and the maxim once FITS, always FITS represents the requirement that developments to the format must be backwards compatible. A major feature of the FITS format is that image metadata is stored in a human-readable ASCII header, so that an interested user can examine the headers to investigate a file of unknown provenance. The information in the header is designed to calculate the byte offset of some information in the subsequent data unit to support direct access to the data cells. Each FITS file consists of one or more headers containing ASCII card images that carry keyword/value pairs, interleaved between data blocks. The keyword/value pairs provide information such as size, origin, coordinates, binary data format, free-form comments, history of the data, and anything else the creator desires: while many keywords are reserved for FITS use, the standard allows arbitrary use of the rest of the name-space.

see more »


Discuss this FITS abbreviation with the community:


Use the citation below to add this abbreviation to your bibliography:


"FITS." Abbreviations.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2016. Web. 23 Oct. 2016. <http://www.abbreviations.com/term/315923>.