Hera Software Tools
The Hera data processing facility provides many
general utility programs for
manipulating FITS format images and tables. Most of these tools are
fairly simple to use and hence are suitable for amateur astronomers
and educators. At the same time, these tools provide many different options
to meet the needs of advanced researchers.
These general tools are organized into several different FTOOLS packages:
-
HEATOOLS
- tasks for listing and editing and calculating statistics about any FITS file,
image processing calculators, and general
table manipulation tools (sorting, appending, selecting rows, etc.)
-
FIMAGE - utilities
for general image processing and manipulation.
-
FUTILS -
a large set of general FITS utility program mainly for manipulating FITS
headers or tables; some of these are older versions
of tools in the HEATOOLS package.
A short tutorial
is available that describe how to get more detailed help on using each of these programs, and
the general features of the IRAF-style parameter interface that is used to run
the tasks from the command line. Hera also provides a graphical user interface
that can be used to enter all the input parameters and run each task.
Hera also provides hundreds of more specialized
programs, mainly for professional researchers, to analyze data from high-energy
astrophysics missions
such as ROSAT, Chandra, Swift, and Suzaku.
Currently, these tools include all the hundreds of programs in the
HEASARC FTOOLS and the
Chandra CIAO data analysis packages.
Please contact the Hera development group at the HEASARC
if there are other software tools
you would like to see added to Hera.
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