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.

imhead

This wraps pyfits.getheader to print an image header to the terminal. There are options to specify an extension header or only certain keys to print. See the code here: https://gist.github.com/1394499.

Examples

Print an entire header:

> imhead jb1f98q1q_raw.fits

Print an extension header:

> imhead -e 1 jb1f98q1q_raw.fits

Print only certain keywords (case insensitive):

> imhead jb1f98q1q_raw.fits -k expstart -k expend

My most common usage is to print the entire header but pipe the output to grep so I don’t have to remember the exact keyword names:

> imhead jb1f98q1q_flt.fits | grep OBS
DATE-OBS= '2009-12-03' / UT date of start of observation (yyyy-mm-dd) 
TIME-OBS= '02:25:29' / UT time of start of observation (hh:mm:ss) 
OBSTYPE = 'IMAGING ' / observation type - imaging or spectroscopic 
OBSMODE = 'ACCUM ' / operating mode

hedit

This wraps pyfits.setval to enable modification of headers from the command line. It supports modification of multiple files with one call, changing extension headers, and specifying the keyword type. See the code here: https://gist.github.com/1394486

Examples

Modify a single file:

> hedit jb1f98q1q_raw.fits EXPSTART 58000 -i
jb1f98q1q_raw.fits[0]: EXPSTART -> 58000

Modify multiple files:

> hedit *.fits FLATCORR PERFORM

Modify an extension header:

> hedit jb1f98q1q_raw.fits SOMEKEY SOMEVALUE --ext 1

Usage

To use these yourself copy the code to a local file wherever you keep scripts and set them to executable. The files I linked above require Python 2.7 because they use the argparse module, but if you are using an older version of Python I’ve also written versions of these using optparse. Those versions are at https://gist.github.com/1401692 (imhead) and https://gist.github.com/1401666 (hedit). Enjoy!