Adding New Image Formats

Currently, the RTD only supports FITS format images. Although it is planned to keep FITS as the internal image format, we do plan to add support for other image formats. This will be done by deriving subclasses the abstract base class ImageIORep . Note that The public interface is through the class ImageIO , which uses a pointer to an ImageIORep subclass for reference counting.

To add support for a new image format, you can derive a class from ImageIORep that reads in the image and converts it to FITS format. (Note: Class BdfIO, for Midas BDF images, is not implemented yet). Note that these classes are now part of the astrotcl package, on which the rtd package is based.