Help with loading file into an array

[peter berrett]

Hi all

I am trying to build a program that can find comets in a series of astronomical images. I have already written functions to find the comet in a series of images, the data of which is stored in embedded lists.

The area I am having difficulty with is take a standard gif file (1024 x 1024) and reading it into an array or embedded lists.

In a nutshell here is an example of what I want to do

Let's say I have a gif file called 20130428_0000_c2_1024.gif in a folder called c:\comets

I want to read the data from that gif file taking the red data (excluding the green and blue data) and store that in an array called Image[][] which is a nested array length 1024 with a list in each item of 1024 length (ie 1024 x 1024)

Could someone please provide a piece of code to do the above so I can then go on to modify it to pick up different files from different folders? In particular I am keen to seen how you read in the data and also how you change the directory from which you are reading the image.

For the record this is not for homework but is a pet project of mine. I have already written a version of the program in Justbasic but python is faster. I am also interested in readers views as to which is the simplest and best way to achieve what I am trying to do.


Thanks Peter