WCSTools 3.9.7
WCSTools QR code
Astronomers often need to relate positions on an image of the sky to positions on the real sky to identify catalogued objects in images, tell other people where to look to find an identified object, or to compute motions of planets, satellites, asteroids, or comets. WCSTools is a package of programs and a library of utility subroutines for setting and using the world coordinate systems (WCS) in the headers of the most common astronomical image formats, FITS and IRAF .imh, to relate image pixels to sky coordinates. This software is all written in very portable C, so it should compile and run on any computer with a C compiler.

The current version is 3.9.7 (Older Versions are here)

Telescope Data Center
Capabilities
Programs

Catalogs

How to Get It
Publications
Acknowledgements Some subroutines in the library have been adapted and amplified from software originally written by Elwood Downey of the University of Iowa Automated Telescope Facility, Bill Cotton of the U.S. NRAO, Mark Calabretta of the Australian CSIRO, and Pat Wallace of the UK Starlink Project. Others are translated from the Fortran code I wrote to support the star and skymap programs.
Release History This software was originally inspired by the impending standardization of WCS keywords in FITS as discussed at the 1994 ADASS Conference. The subroutines to translate between sky and image coordinates came first, then the utilities to use them, and then the programs to search catalogs and fit a world coordinate systems to images.


Last updated 26 April 2022 by Jessica Mink [email]