aquatiko / astroimages.jl

Visualization of astronomical images

AstroImages.jl

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Introduction

AstroImage.jl allows you to plot images from an astronomical FITS file using the popular Images.jl and Plots.jl Julia packages. AstroImage.jl uses FITSIO.jl to read FITS files.

Installation

AstroImage.jl is available for Julia 0.7 and later versions, and can be installed with Julia built-in package manager. This packages is not yet registered, after entering into the package manager by pressing ] run the command

pkg> add https://github.com/JuliaAstro/AstroImages.jl

Usage

After installing the package, you can start using it with

julia> using AstroImages

Reading extensions from FITS file

You can load and read the the first extension of a FITS file with the load function, from FileIO.jl:

julia> load("file.fits")
1300×1200 Array{UInt16,2}:
[...]

The second argument of this load method is the number of the extension to read. Read the third extension of the file with:

julia> load("file.fits", 3)
1300×1200 Array{UInt16,2}:
[...]

AstroImage type

The package provides a new type, AstroImage to integrate FITS images with Julia packages for plotting and image processing. The AstroImage function has the same syntax as load. This command:

julia> img = AstroImage("file.fits")
AstroImages.AstroImage{UInt16,ColorTypes.Gray}[...]

will read the first extension from the file.fits file and wrap its content in a Matrix{Gray}, that can be easily used with Images.jl and related packages.

If you are working in a Jupyter notebook, an AstroImage object is automatically rendered as a PNG image.

Plotting an AstroImage

An AstroImage object can be plotted with Plots.jl package. Just use

julia> using Plots

julia> plot(img)

and the image will be displayed as a heatmap using your favorite backend.

License

The AstroImages.jl package is licensed under the MIT "Expat" License. The original author is Mosè Giordano.