The checksum keywords described here provide an integrity check on the information contained in FITS HDUs. (Header and Data Units are the basic components of FITS files, consisting of header keyword records followed by optional associated data record
s). The CHECKSUM keyword is defined to have a value that forces the 32-bit 1s complement checksum accumulated over all the 2880-byte FITS logical records in the HDU to equal negative 0. (Note that 1s complement arithmetic has both positive and negative zero elements). Verifying that the accumulated checksum is still equal to -0 provides a fast and fairly reliable way to determine that the HDU has not been modified by subsequent data processing operations or corrupted while copying or storing the file on physical media.
This document describes a convention for compressing FITS binary tables that is modeled after the FITS tiled-image compression method (White et al. 2009) that has been in use for about a decade. The input table is first optionally subdivided into til
es, each containing an equal number of rows, then every column of data within each tile is compressed and stored as a variable-length array of bytes in the output FITS binary table. All the header keywords from the input table are copied to the header of the output table and remain uncompressed for efficient access. The output compressed table contains the same number and order of columns as in the input uncompressed binary table. There is one row in the output table corresponding to each tile of rows in the input table. In principle, each column of data can be compressed using a different algorithm that is optimized for the type of data within that column, however in the prototype implementation described here, the gzip algorithm is used to compress every column.
This document describes a convention for compressing n-dimensional images and storing the resulting byte stream in a variable-length column in a FITS binary table. The FITS file structure outlined here is independent of the specific data compression
algorithm that is used. The implementation details for 4 widely used compression algorithms are described here, but any other compression technique could also be supported by this convention. The general principle used in this convention is to first divide the n-dimensional image into a rectangular grid of subimages or tiles. Each tile is then compressed as a block of data, and the resulting compressed byte stream is stored in a row of a variable length column in a FITS binary table. By dividing the image into tiles it is generally possible to extract and uncompress subsections of the image without having to uncompress the whole image.
Fpack is a utility program for optimally compressing images in the FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) data format (see http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov). The associated funpack program restores the compressed image file back to its original state (if a
lossless compression algorithm is used). (An experimental method for compressing FITS binary tables is also available; see section 7). These programs may be run from the host operating system command line and are analogous to the gzip and gunzip utility programs except that they are optimized for FITS format images and offer a wider choice of compression options.
