[SciPy-user] HDF5 vs FITS

[Perry Greenfield]

On Apr 22, 2007, at 6:18 AM, Francesc Altet wrote:

> El dv 20 de 04 del 2007 a les 20:07 -0400, en/na James Turner va
> escriure:
>>> It links to this paper which goes more in depth, but is still an
>>> overview of the capabilities (rather than documentation about how
>>> to use the libraries).
>>
>> Thanks -- that paper (2nd link) is a good reference, including a
>> format comparison table on pages 8-9.
>>
>> I see the paper claims that "HDF5 is compatible with all of the
>> competing formats discussed in Item 10b in that those data models can
>> be expressed in terms of HDF5.", with one of the "competing formats"
>> being FITS.
>
> It depends on what the author would mean by 'compatible'. I think that
> HDF5 is not meant to read FITS directly (nor will be in the  
> future), but
> through a conversor. There is a RFC about this subject going on:
>
> http://www.hdfgroup.uiuc.edu/RFC/HDF5/fits2h5/fits2h5.htm

That's right. Presumably they just mean that all possible FITS  
structures can be mapped into HDF constructs isomorphically. And  
that's what the converter does.

Perry