GNU Astronomy Utilities

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5.2 ConvertType

The formats of astronomical data were defined mainly for archiving and processing. In other situations, the data might be useful in other formats. For example, when you are writing a paper or report or if you are making slides for a talk, you can’t use a FITS image. Other image formats should be used. In other cases you might want your pixel values in a table format as plain text for input to other programs that don’t recognize FITS, or to include as a table in your report. ConvertType is created for such situations. The various types will increase with future updates and based on need.

The conversion is not only one way (from FITS to other formats), but two ways (except the EPS and PDF formats). So you can convert a JPEG image or text file into a FITS image. Basically, other than EPS, you can use any of the recognized formats as different color channel inputs to get any of the recognized outputs. So before explaining the options and arguments, first a short description of the recognized files types will be given followed a short introduction to digital color.