Introduction

This manual describes NimCfitsio, a set of bindings to the CFITSIO library for the Nim language.

The purpose of NimCfitsio is to allow the creation/reading/writing of FITS files (either containing images or tables) from Nim programs. The interface matches the underlying C library quite close, but in a number of cases the syntax is nicer, thanks to Nim’s richer and more expressive syntax.

So far the library provides an extensive, albeit not complete, coverage of the functions to read/write keywords and ASCII/binary tables. More extensive support for reading/writing images (i.e., 2D matrices of numbers) is yet to come.

The specification of the FITS file format is provided in the article Definition of the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS), version 3.0 (Astronomy & Astrophysics, 524, A42, 2010).