[AstroPy] [SciPy-user] FITS images with header-supplied axes?

[Russell E Owen]

At 1:51 PM -0400 2008-04-01, Bridgman, William T. wrote:
>I agree there is some lack of coordination on some of these 
>projects.  Such is the nature of Open Source.
>
>I think there is also an issue where some of the projects are 
>overkill for what individuals might need for production-pipeline/
>research/educational uses.  Hence many of us start from scratch to 
>keep the work compact.  It's only later that we discover others 
>working in similar directions.
>
>I obtained a copy of pywcs many months ago, trying to get 
>heliographic coordinate systems installed.  Other priorities 
>intervened and by the time I got back to it, migration to numpy and 
>changes in pyFITS seemed to break the previous version.  I didn't get 
>a chance to make any revisions operational.
>
>Would there be any interest in members of the list publishing a short 
>description of what types of modules they are designing in their own 
>work?  It might be worthwhile for coordination & possible 
>collaborations.  My requirements for work projects are quite
>different from my recreational & educational python projects.

Good idea.

I'm part of the team working on data processing for the LSST. This 
number crunching is done in C++ and the high level operations are 
done in python. This work will probably be primarily of interest to 
those processing a lot of data because it is pipeline-oriented.

The final product will include:
- basic types for images, masks and masked images
- image linearization (bias subtraction, flat fielding, etc.)
- wcs determination
- source detection
- image subtraction

We intend it to be usable on a variety of data sources (not just 
LSST) since that's the only way to test it. Nonetheless it will 
probably take a bit of work to massage the data headers.

As far as wcs goes: right now we use wcslib and have a limited python 
interface on it. I suspect if anything better came along we'd be 
happy to switch. (at least at the C++ level; I'm not sure about the 
Python level).

-- Russell