NAME¶

tofits - Turn a list of keyrecords to a valid FITS file

DESCRIPTION¶

tofits turns a list of FITS header keyrecords, one per line, into a proper FITS header by padding them with blanks to 80 characters and stripping out newline characters. It also pads the header to an integral number of 2880- byte blocks if necessary.

The input byte stream is assumed to be ASCII-encoded. Characters outside the set of text characters allowed by FITS (ASCII 0x20 to 0x7E) are ignored with the sole exception that a byte with value 0xA0 (non-breaking space in all variants of ISO/IEC 8859) is translated to an ordinary space (0x20). Thus input encoded in ISO/IEC 8859 or UTF-8 should be interpreted correctly, with any illegal characters in keycomments simply being ignored.

tofits has no options and operates as a filter, reading from stdin and writing to stdout, e.g.

tofits < infile > outfile

Input lines beginning with '#' are treated as comments.