Since 1 April 2016 we are only able to provide data in a compressed format, using a library called FPack. The advantage is that it reduces the file size by a factor 3.5 but can still be read (without needing to decompress it) by our image pipeline and most astronomical software.

Software which opens .fz files

SAO DS9

JS9

APT

AstroImageJ (download, then update by running AstroImageJ, Help > Update to version 3.4.0)

to version 3.4.0) SalsaJ

Python (using Astropy library)

Problems Using LCO data?

If you cannot use data which has been compressed with FPack you can use the following steps to decompress it back into the conventional FITS format.

DS9

If you have a copy of DS9 you can use this to convert your images. Open the image ( File > Open...), then save the image as a regular FITS file ( File > Save as Fits).

FITS Liberator

If you are using FITS Liberator, you do not need to unpack the FITS files. Just remove the .fz from the filename, leaving .fits on the end.

Windows 7+

Download the FPack library Right-click the fpacklib.zip file once it has downloaded and select "Extract" Copy all the files you extracted from the fpacklib.zip file, into the same directory as your data files (the ones which end '.fz') Double click on the file called funpacker.bat (it might just appear as 'funpacker') DO NOT USE FPack.exe or FunPack.exe All the .fz files in your folder should now end in '.fits'

Mac OS X

Open the 'Terminal' application, located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal Follow the instructions for installing the library CFITSIO (this contains fpack). You can now type funpack followed by the name of each file ending in '.fz', or you can type "funpack *.fz" to decompress all of them at once.

If you are still having problems with this please use our help page for assistance.