MacResearch

QLFits, as its name indicates, is a QuickLook generator for Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files. QLFits 1.0 provides a quick access to FITS headers. It gives a quick summary of the most important information, and colorizes the keywords/values/comments. In case it detects a file created by the European Southern Observatory, it also provides web links to program's abstract, weather conditions and more.

Never heard about FITS? Probably, but this is THE format for astronomers' data. Every single image, spectrum, data cubes and so on are stored in this format. It has some peculiarities among which to have a single-line header where every piece of information is coded to span 80 caracters. Astronomers often end up with zillions of such files to work with (especially with infrared jittering instruments). QLFits aims at providing a quick yet reliable way to acesss FITS files information without opening it (It is usually done with an X-window-unixy-geeky program, i.e. not really the Mac way...)

QLFits 1.0 provides a quick access to FITS headers (only, see below). It builds a quick summary of the most important information, and colorizes the keywords/values/comments. In case it detects a FITS file created by the European Southern Observatory (that's where the developper used to work), it also provides some nice web links to ESO's archive system for additional information about program's abstract, weather conditions when the file has been taken and so on.

QLFits is available at the Soft Tenebras Lux website.

Post Scriptum: Help wanted. QLFits 1.0 as for now provides only the header information. However, it would be WAY more useful if it could also preview the image itself, or the spectrum, or the whole datacube, or all of these... The developper is very much Python-oriented, but try to learn nightly Xcode, Cocoa, and Objective-C. Anyone interested to help, contribute, or give some advices on how to read FITS and draw in a (PDF)Context with Xcode, please contact the developper on website above. It's good karma! Thanks for him.