FITS

The FITS standard was designed specifically for astronomical data, and includes provisions such as describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata.

Each FITS file consists of one or more headers containing ASCII card images (80 character fixed-length strings) that carry keyword/value pairs, interleaved between data blocks.

As FITS has been generalized from its original form, the world coordinate system (WCS) specifications have become more and more sophisticated: early FITS images allowed a simple scaling factor to represent the size of the pixels; but recent versions of the standard permit multiple nonlinear coordinate systems, representing arbitrary distortions of the image.

Together with the ability to string multiple header/data blocks together, this allows FITS files to represent entire relational databases.

FITS support is available in a variety of programming languages that are used for scientific work, including C,[6] C++, C#, Fortran,[6] IGOR Pro, IDL, Java, Julia,[7] LabVIEW, Mathematica, MATLAB, Perl, Perl Data Language (PDL), Python, R, and Tcl.

Scientific teams frequently write their own code to interact with their FITS data, using the tools available in their language of choice.