GNU Astronomy Utilities manual

3.1.2 CFITSIO

CFITSIO is the closest you can get to the pixels in a FITS image while remaining faithful to the FITS standard ²⁵. It is written by William Pence, the author of the FITS standard²⁶, and is regularly updated. Setting the definitions for all other software packages using FITS images.

Some GNU/Linux distributions have CFITSIO in their package managers, if it is available and updated, you can use it. One problem that might occur is that CFITSIO might not be configured with the --enable-reentrant option by the distribution. This option allows CFITSIO to open a file in multiple threads. If so, upon running, any program which needs this capability will warn you and abort if you ask for multiple threads. In such cases you can take the following step.

The best way is that you can install CFITSIO from source. You can download the latest version of the source code and manual from its webpage²⁷. We strongly recommend that you have a look through Chapter 2 (Creating the CFITSIO library) of the CFITSIO manual and understand the options you can pass to $ ./configure (they aren’t too much). This is a very basic package for most astronomical software and it is best that you configure it nicely with your system. Once you download the source and unpack it, the following configure script should be enough for most purposes. Don’t forget to read chapter two of the manual though, for example the second option is only for 64bit systems. The manual also explains how to check if it has been installed correctly.

$ tar -vxzf cfitsio_latest.tar.gz
$ cd cfitsio
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr/local --enable-sse2 --enable-reentrant
$ make
$ sudo make install

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GNU Astronomy Utilities manual, November 2015.