Thursday, August 18, 2016

LabPlot is comfortable with FITS

So we are here, GSoC 2016 is officially over, it's time for the final evaluations, so this will be a closing post for this GSoC. I've learned many things while I was working on my project and I'm really thankful to my mentors, Stefan and Alexander (not officially my mentor, but we talked many times and he helped me many times too). I'll be happy to help in integration of this project in the next release of LabPlot :)
Since my last post I've fixed some minor bugs, and implemented some new features too.

Let's say we want to add a new keyword to one of our FITS extension:

FITS header editor's new keyword adding dialog
 And then we can add units to our keyword, which will appear in squared bracelets in the beginning of the comment:


Keyword unit adding dialog
I added some predefined units, such as meters, kilograms, seconds, parsec, solar mass, astronomical unit, kelvin, light year.
The newly added keyword unit

If a keyword has some kind of unit defined already, then the dialog will be shown with the unit of the keyword:


Saving keyword modifications

We have modified this value, the original is "lw", as you can see in the treeview.


The saved extension with the new keywords value
As you can see, after saving the modifications, and reopening the file, the name of the extension is modified.

Import a subset of data 

Let's say we have this image, but we'd like to import just a portion of it.

We just have to set the start/end row/columns in the import dialog,

..and voilá

File info dialog improved for FITS files


Import FITS tables to matrices

If the selected table extension has numeric columns (at least one) then we can import those in matrices. (btw notice the nice icons in the treeview, thanks to Alexander for the idea)


As you can see, the second and third column contains only values, so after import our matrix:


I think this was it. I hope you enjoyed it too. I'm really happy that I was part of GSoC '16, it's one of my greatest experiences. I look forward on reading other GSoC students blogs and I wish good luck to everybody on the final evaluation! :)