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 1.0 and later versions, and can be installed with Julia built-in package manager.

pkg> add AstroImages

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,1,Float64}[...]

will read the first valid extension from the file.fits file and wrap its content in a NTuple{N, 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.

AstroImage automatically extracts and store wcs information of images in a NTuple{N, WCSTransform}.

Forming RGB image

AstroImage can automatically construct a RGB image if 3 different colour band data is given.

julia> img = AstroImage(RGB, ("file1.fits","file2.fits", "file3.fits"))

Where 1st index of file1.fits, file2.fits, file3.fits contains band data of red, blue and green channels respectively.

Optionally, ccd2rgb method can be used to form a coloured image from 3 bands without creating an AstroImage.

The formed image can be accessed using img.property.rgb_image. set_brightness! and set_contrast! methods can be used to change brightness and contrast of formed rgb_image. add_label! method can be used to add/store Astronomical labels in an AstroImage. reset! method resets brightness, contrast and label fields to defaults and construct a fresh rgb_image without any brightness, contrast operations.

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.