Yes, this is a Python library for storing astronomical data in the PNG format. We take advantage of the supported bit depths of PNGs, which can store either 8 bit or 16 bit integers. For the cases when a FITS image is stored as a floating point number, we quantize the data and store a zero point and scale factor in a custom PNG chunk. We also preserve the FITS header in another custom chunk.

Numpy (http://numpy.scipy.org/) PyFITS (http://www.stsci.edu/institute/software_hardware/pyfits) PyPNG (http://code.google.com/p/pypng/)

1. Download the source code from the repository (https://github.com/kapadia/astropng)

   git clone git@github.com:kapadia/astropng.git

2. Navigate to the root directory of the library

3. Run setup.py

   python setup.py install

import astropng

# To convert from a FITS image to a PNG
ap = astropng.AstroPNG('blah.fits')
ap.to_png('blah.png')

# To convert from a PNG back to a FITS image
ap = astropng.AstroPNG('blah.png')
ap.to_fits('blah.fits')

Stoehr, F. et al. 2007, ST-ECF Newsletter. 42, 4.

White, Richard L, Perry Greenfield, William Pence, Nasa Gsfc, Doug Tody, and Rob Seaman. 2011. Tiled Image Convention for Storing Compressed Images in FITS Binary Tables: 1-17.