Re: FITS header problem

[Arjen van der Meer <ameer@science.uva.nl>]

First of all: There is the eclipse package of ESO that contains the
command dfits and fitsort, which is extremely handy for catalogues.
It works on the command line like e.g.

dfits *.fits | fitsort "ESO.BLA"

This reads the fits-headers of *.fits and filters out the content of
ESO.BLA. Then you don't have to convert fits to bdf. bdf to tbl tbl to
txt
etc....

If for another reason you like to continue with the result of create/ost

(I don't know the command very well) then a possibility is to change the

descriptor of your bdf file into a REAl or DOUBLE descriptor by e.g copy

it into a character keyword. Is should be something like this, but look
in
the help:

DEFINE/LOCAL value/C/1/80 " "
DEFINE/LOCAL newvalue/D/1/20 0.0

copy/dk blabla.bdf descriptorname/C/0/80 value
newvalue = {value(1:5)}   ! to read the first 5 characters

Then you have to write a new descriptor with write/desc and copy the
newvalue in to that with copy/kd

Also take a look in the help of
write/keyword
It explains a bit better how to read a character keyword than
read/keyword...

Of course you can also copy the whole .prg file of create/ost and then
edit that. Most of the time it is just another sequence of MIDAS
commands.
With echo/on or echo/full you can see what happens during the program.

Good luck

Arjen

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Arjen van der Meer
Sterrenkundig Instituut
"Anton Pannekoek"               room:  H 3.44
Kruislaan 403                   phone: +31-205925097
1098 SJ Amsterdam               email: ameer@science.uva.nl
The Netherlands                 http:  www.astro.uva.nl/~ameer
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