[AstroPy] Read FITS headers without loading data

[Gary Bernstein]

Thanks for setting me straight Erik.

Typically 60 extensions per FITS files.  Each is a binary table of cataloged objects from one CCD of a mosaic camera.  So there are many keywords in the header and perhaps I am just seeing the processing time for this.

On Sep 8, 2014, at 11:14 AM, Erik Bray <embray at stsci.edu> wrote:

> On 09/08/2014 10:40 AM, Gary Bernstein wrote:
>> I would like to extract the header information from a large multi-extension FITS file using astropy.io.fits.  This runs very slowly, and I suspect because it is reading the data of each extension when the header is accessed e.g. via
>> 
>> import astropy.io.fits as pf
>> f = pf.open(‘mef.fits’)
>> for hdu in f:
>>     h = hdu.header
>>     … do stuff with header…
>> 
>> It is *much* faster using e.g. cfitsio utilities (<<1 second compared to 10’s of seconds for the above on a multiple-GB file).  Am I correct that the data is being loaded for each extension in the above method?  If so is there a workaround?  Neither using getheader nor (un)setting memmap seems to make a difference.
> 
> No, it doesn't touch the data when just reading headers.  The difference depends 
> largely on what you're doing with the headers, though in general it's due to the 
> fact that CFITSIO is written in C while PyFITS is written in pure Python, and 
> does a lot more to parse headers into an in-memory data structure.
> 
> That said, how many headers are in this file?  It shouldn't take "10's of 
> seconds" though again that might depend in part on what you're doing.
> 
> Erik
> 
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