LCO image data is available in a compressed format, using a library called FPack. The advantage is that it reduces the file size by a factor 3.5 but can still be read (without needing to decompress it) by our image pipeline and most astronomical software.
Software which opens .fz files
- SAO DS9
- JS9
- APT
- AstroImageJ (download, then update by running AstroImageJ, Help > Update to version 3.4.0)
- SalsaJ
- Python (using Astropy library)
Problems Using LCO data?
If you cannot use data which has been compressed with FPack you can use the following steps to decompress it back into the conventional FITS format.
LCO Archive Download
The easiest way to obtain uncompressed FITS images is to download them from the LCO archive by selecting "with uncompressed fits files" from the download menu.
DS9
If you have a copy of DS9 you can use this to convert your images. Open the image ( File > Open...), then save the image as a regular FITS file ( File > Save as Fits).
FITS Liberator
If you are using FITS Liberator, you do not need to unpack the FITS files. Just remove the .fz from the filename, leaving .fits on the end.
Windows 7+
- Download the FPack library
- Right-click the fpacklib.zip file once it has downloaded and select "Extract"
- Copy all the files you extracted from the fpacklib.zip file, into the same directory as your data files (the ones which end '.fz')
- Double click on the file called funpacker.bat (it might just appear as 'funpacker')
- DO NOT USE FPack.exe or FunPack.exe
- All the .fz files in your folder should now end in '.fits'
Mac OS X
- Open the 'Terminal' application, located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal
- Follow the instructions for installing the library CFITSIO (this contains fpack).
- You can now type funpack followed by the name of each file ending in '.fz', or you can type "funpack *.fz" to decompress all of them at once.
You can loop through all files in the current directory by typing the following into a terminal: