Color FITS not opening correctly

Questions and answers about processing in StarTools and how to accomplish certain tasks.
Post Reply
gustavo_sanchez
Posts: 23
Joined: Fri Oct 12, 2012 3:37 pm
Location: Puerto Rico
Contact:

Color FITS not opening correctly

Post by gustavo_sanchez »

Hello,

Previously, I was able to open my stacked FITS files obtained from Nebulosity directly into Startools. They were taken with a OSC camera, and reconstructed, aligned and stacked in Nebulosity. However, when I open them in Startools, they show up as mono images. This issue appeared in the most recent versions, not before. Right now, my workaround is to convert the FITS images into TIFFs; then StarTools recognizes them as color images.
User avatar
admin
Site Admin
Posts: 3367
Joined: Thu Dec 02, 2010 10:51 pm
Location: Melbourne
Contact:

Re: Color FITS not opening correctly

Post by admin »

gustavo_sanchez wrote:Hello,

Previously, I was able to open my stacked FITS files obtained from Nebulosity directly into Startools. They were taken with a OSC camera, and reconstructed, aligned and stacked in Nebulosity. However, when I open them in Startools, they show up as mono images. This issue appeared in the most recent versions, not before. Right now, my workaround is to convert the FITS images into TIFFs; then StarTools recognizes them as color images.
Hi Gustavo,

Nothing has changed in the StarTools FITS code for a long time. Could it be an option in Nebulosity that has changed?
The FITS format allows for many ways to store many types of data.
Some programs store individual color channels as separate data sets with no relation to eachother, while others (correctly) store them as a related data sets, so that the program reading the data sets knows that they are related (and how they are related).
Separating individual color channels as completely unrelated separate data sets is ambiguous (for example, some Hubble data sets store bad pixel maps and other 1D instrumentation data as separate datasets), so in such cases StarTools just takes the first dataset that it comes across and ignores all others.
Let me know if you can find some option that changed in Nebulosity in this regard, else I'd love ot get my hands on one such problematic FITS file soI can analyze what's going on!

Thanks,
Ivo Jager
StarTools creator and astronomy enthusiast
Post Reply