FITSIOWRAP

a wrapper that makes FITSIO look like IMFORT to a calling program

fitsiowrap

is a set of Fortran subroutines that look like the IMFORT subroutines which access the native IRAF image format, but actually call FITSIO library routines to open and manipulate FITS image files. This enables someone with a collection of legacy code (ahem), full of IMFORT calls, to keep it alive by using FITS files without changing the code.

History

Why would anyone want this? A little history: many astronomers use the IRAF package to manipulate their data, especially 2-d CCD images. IRAF used to use only its own format for image data, and stored each image in two files, header foo.imh and pixel data foo.pix. The IRAF people supplied a library of subroutines called IMFORT that could be called from FORTRAN (and C if you were ingenious) if you wanted to write your own program to manipulate the .imh and .pix files.

Later versions of IRAF (v2.10?) became able to handle FITS image files. FITS is a widely accepted standard and is far more portable than the native IRAF format was (if I recall correctly, before IRAF V2.11 the .pix files were even raw binaries that got mangled when moving from big-endian to little-endian machines). This was a major step forward. And if you want to write programs to access FITS files, you can use the FITSIO library.

Legacy Code problems

Unfortunately, if you had already written lots of code with more than a trivial number of IMFORT calls, porting it to use FITSIO is a royal pain. This is what FITSIOWRAP is for. It is essentially an IMFORT lookalike written in Fortran that calls FITSIO routines. You just link your code to both it and a FITSIO library.

I wrote this a while ago, and there may not be anyone else left with a bunch of IMFORT-using legacy code. I'm putting this up in the hope it saves somebody else a headache. If you're dedicated enough to read this far, you may be one of those people. It does not implement all IMFORT subroutines, but most of the ones that you need to access 1-d and 2-d images and image headers. The code is simply two Fortran files:

 fitsiowrap.f - all the subroutines
 nmax.f       - header file that defines the biggest image you'll use
                e.g. 2048, 4096, etc. edit to change.

FITSIOWRAP is free, copyrighted, and GPL licensed: fitsiowrap.tar

(I can't imagine anyone could actually sell this code, but what the heck, I always wanted to give some software away)

FITSIOWRAP doesn't include every last IMFORT subroutine. It has the common ones that I've needed. If there is a subroutine that you desperately need and it's not included, contact me and I might be able to implement it.

You can download the IMFORT manual provided by IRAF. It doesn't have the reference manual pages for commands (possibly the most essential part), though.

Credits:

FITSIOWRAP grew out of a germ of two routines written by Dan Kelson. The bulk of the original version was written by Ben Weiner. Povilas Palunas cleaned some routines up and added several. I (BJW) am responsible for the "final" version. FITSIOWRAP was written while I was supported by a fellowship from the Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Contact: Benjamin Weiner, email bjw at earth.astro.umd.edu