GNU Astronomy Utilities manual

3.1.3 WCSLIB

WCSLIB is also written and maintained by one of the authors of the World Coordinate System (WCS) definition in the FITS standard²⁸, Mark Calabretta. It might be already built and ready in your distribution’s package management system. Here installation from source is explained. To install WCSLIB you will need to have CFITSIO already installed, see CFITSIO. WCSLIB also has plotting capabilities which use PGPLOT (a plotting library for C). However, if you will not be using its plotting functions, you can configure it such that pgplot is not required.

If you do want to make plots with WCSLIB, there is an explanation in PGPLOT. To disable the dependency on PGPLOT, you have to add the --without-pgplot option to the configure script as you can see below. You can get the most recent source code from the WCSLIB webpage²⁹. In the directory where you have downloaded the compressed file, you can take the following steps (the x.xx represents the version number):

$ tar -jxvf wcslib.tar.bz2
$ cd wcslib-x.xx
$ ./configure --without-pgplot LIBS="-pthread -lm"
$ make
$ make check
$ sudo make install

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GNU Astronomy Utilities manual, November 2015.