wcshead(1)

✨ wcshead(1) ✨

okay bestie, so you know how FITS and IRAF image headers have all that world coordinate system (WCS) lore buried in them? wcshead is literally the girl who goes in there and pulls it out for you. it's a General Commands Manual situation, and honestly? iconic. 💅

🎀 NAME 🎀

wcshead — print the WCS part of a FITS or IRAF image header

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

wcshead [-hrtvsz] FITS or IRAF file(s)

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So wcshead is this lil utility that prints out the world coordinate system info sitting inside IRAF and FITS image headers. no cap.

Here's the tea though: if you hand it an IRAF .imh image header, it converts it to FITS format first before it extracts anything. so it's doing a whole lil glow-up on your file behind the scenes. 💖

And for IRAF files specifically, the image dimensions and the object name get set from the binary portion of the header. not the text part, the binary part. iykyk.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

• -h — print the CRVALs as hh:mm:ss and dd:mm:ss instead of in degrees. cute lil sexagesimal moment for you astronomers. ⭐
• -r — print the first dimension as rest wavelength limiting values
• -t — print tab-separated table output, and yes, with headers. very spreadsheet-coded of it. 🎀
• -v — print more intermediate information for debugging. she's yapping (affectionately) so you can figure out what's going on. 🔍
• -w — print only the first dimension limiting values (which is the wavelength, for spectra)
• -z — use AIPS classic projections instead of WCSLIB

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Jessica Mink, SAO (jmink@cfa.harvard.edu)

okay that's the whole page, you ate that fr fr 🫶

this one's from the WCSTools era, dated 19 July 2004 — so yeah, she's a legacy queen and we respect her 💜

mwah, go read some headers bestie 💖✨🌈