We saw in the previous section () how to store
and retrieve any kind of AST Object in a FITS header by using a
FitsChan. To achieve this, we set the FitsChan's Encoding attribute to
NATIVE. However, the Objects we wrote could then only be read back by
other programs that use AST.
In practice, we will also encounter FITS headers containing WCS information written by other software systems. We will probably also need to write FITS headers in a format that can be understood by these systems. Indeed, this interchange of data is one of the main reasons for the existence of FITS, so in this section we will examine how to accommodate these requirements.
AST A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy