Working at STSCI I frequently deal with FITS files and while working on the new CALACS pipeline I often needed to see and change header values to run CALACS under different regimes. This can be done with IRAF tasks imhead and hedit but I try to use IRAF as little as possible.

PyFITS has convenience functions for working with FITS headers but as of version 3.0.7 it doesn’t come with any scripts that make them accessible from the command line. I expect that soon PyFITS and/or AstroPy will have these scripts, but in the meantime here are the ones I use. Continue reading “Python imhead and hedit” →