imhead(1)

👑 imhead — bestie edition

okay so real quick, this is imhead(1) from the General Commands Manual section, and it's literally one of the most useful little tools you'll ever meet, no cap. 💖

✨ NAME ✨

imhead — print the header of a FITS or IRAF image. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 🎀

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

imhead [options] FITS or IRAF filename

like, you give it a file, it gives you the header. iconic behavior fr fr. 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

so imhead is a utility for listing IRAF and FITS image headers. that's its whole main character job. 👑

here's the tea though: if you hand it an IRAF file, it does not just read it straight up — it first converts those IRAF .imh image headers into FITS format, and then lists them for you. a little transformation moment. a little glow-up. ✨

and for IRAF files specifically, these keywords get set from the binary portion of the header:

• BITPIX
• NAXIS
• NAXIS1
• NAXIS2
• OBJECT
• PIXFILE

also IMHFILE gets set from the actual filename, but that one's for internal purposes only, so don't worry about it bestie, it's just doing its little behind-the-scenes thing. 🙈

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -f — write the exact FITS header, with no inserted newlines and including trailing blanks. so like, zero editorializing, zero beautifying, just raw and unfiltered. it's giving "no notes, verbatim". 🫶
• -v — print the name of the file and the program version before the header. perfect if you need receipts on which version you're running. very slay, very responsible. 📋
• -z — set BITPIX to 0 so you output a dataless header. header only, no data attached, just the aesthetic. 💀✨

🌈 AUTHOR 🌈

Jessica Mink, SAO — jmink@cfa.harvard.edu

she ate and left absolutely no crumbs. 👑

lowkey a reminder bestie: every single flag matters here, so don't skip the -f if you need the header exactly as-is, and don't expect data out of -z because that's literally the opposite of the point. 😭

and that's the whole page, bestie — this one came from WCSTools, dated 6 July 2001. old but gold, fr fr. mwah. 💜🧚‍♀️🌸