hierarch28(1)

💅 hierarch28(1) — the glow-up your FITS headers have been waiting for 💅

okay bestie, so hierarch28 is a General Commands Manual girlie, and she does exactly one thing but she does it iconically: header conversion from ESO to standard FITS. ✨

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🌸 NAME 🌸

hierarch28 — header conversion from ESO to standard FITS

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🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

hierarch28 [options] <FITS> [table]

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🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the vibe: hierarch28 takes the keyword names in a FITS header and converts them into new names, using a conversion table in ASCII that you provide. She's lowkey a specialist — her whole thing is yeeting non-standard FITS features out of existence, and the big one is those HIERARCH ESO keyword names. bye bestie 💀

She can also do a translation to the IRAF convention, but only on these four keywords, no more no less:

• 'RA'
• 'DEC'
• 'UT'
• 'LST'

IRAF is picky and needs these keywords to hold the string representation of their values, like, literally as text. For example:

RA      = ' 09:45:14.594'
DEC     = '-33:47:09.420'
UT      = ' 01:17:21.950'
LST     = ' 08:19:59.688'

Meanwhile the ESO standard (peep http://archive.eso.org/dicb) says these keywords are supposed to be floating point values — with the units being degrees for RA/DEC, and elapsed seconds since midnight for UT/LST. different strokes, fr fr.

So if you do want that translation to happen, just add these four lines to your conversion table:

RA = RA
DEC = DEC
UT = UT
LST = LST

and she'll handle it. 🫶

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✨ OPTIONS ✨

• -g — this one generates default translation tables for you. slay, she's helpful like that. 👑

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📂 FILES 📂

hierarch28 expects a conversion table as input, periodt. The default name for this table is table.conv, and she looks for it in the current working directory. If you wanna point her at a different name, just drop that name as the last argument on the command-line. 🍓

This ASCII file is a whole list of keywords to replace, and the format goes like this:

#
# Comment lines start with a hash '#'
# Blank lines would be ignored
#
OLDKEYWORD1 = NEWKEYWORD1
OLDKEYWORD2 = NEWKEYWORD2
etc.

Input keywords are character strings, so yes, they can absolutely contain blanks. Example time:

HIERARCH ESO DET DIT = DETDIT

⚠️ Now the one important restriction, and no cap this is important: the new keyword name may not be longer than the initial one. If you try it, the program will complain that it cannot achieve search and replace. it's giving "the math isn't mathing" 😭

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🔥 IMPORTANT 🔥

Okay this is the part where we get serious for a sec. This program achieves maximal speed because it modifies the input file directly. And the consequence of that is a lot:

💀 Be aware that using hierarch28 on a file will modify its contents in an irreversible way! 💀

Like, no undo, no take-backs, no "wait bestie I changed my mind". Back up your file first, that's the vibe check. 🙈

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🌈 SEE ALSO 🌈

(no extra references in this one, she's self-contained and honestly? main character energy 💜)

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and that's the whole page, babe — hierarch28 from the General Commands Manual, dated 29 May 2000, and yeah the date is old but the girlbossery is timeless. go convert those headers, ily, mwah 💖✨🎀