[AstroPy] RICE support in PyFITS (was: AstroPy Digest, Vol 86, Issue 9)

[Erik Bray]

On 11/11/2013 02:52 PM, Sebastian wrote:
> Just wondering, will RICE compressed FITS files also be supported?

Hi Sebastian,

I'm not exactly sure how this related to the messages in the digest you 
responded to, but I'm assuming you're asking about support for RICE compressed 
FITS images in PyFITS and/or Astropy.

RICE-compressed images (and images compressed with other algorithms support by 
the FITS Tiled Image Compression Convention [1]) have been supported by PyFITS 
(and by extension Astropy) for some time now.

If there was some file you had trouble reading, possibly created with more 
recent versions of fpack, it's possible that it was using some newer extensions 
to the convention that were not previously supported.  Though soon we will be 
releasing PyFITS v3.2 and Astropy v0.3, both of which support the latest version 
of this convention (2.3, released in July 2013).  So if you *are* having 
problems with this it's likely that will solve them.

Erik

P.S. Support for the beta features in fpack for compressing binary tables is not 
yet implemented, but hopefully that's not what you're referring to.

[1] http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/registry/tilecompression.html