GNU Astronomy Utilities



10.1 Sort FITS files by night

FITS images usually contain (several) keywords for preserving important dates. In particular, for lower-level data, this is usually the observation date and time (for example, stored in the DATE-OBS keyword value). When analyzing observed datasets, many calibration steps (like the dark, bias or flat-field), are commonly calculated on a per-observing-night basis.

However, the FITS standard’s date format (YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.ddd) is based on the western (Gregorian) calendar. Dates that are stored in this format are complicated for automatic processing: a night starts in the final hours of one calendar day, and extends to the early hours of the next calendar day. As a result, to identify datasets from one night, we commonly need to search for two dates. However calendar peculiarities can make this identification very difficult. For example, when an observation is done on the night separating two months (like the night starting on March 31st and going into April 1st), or two years (like the night starting on December 31st 2018 and going into January 1st, 2019). To account for such situations, it is necessary to keep track of how many days are in a month, and leap years, etc.

Gnuastro’s astscript-sort-by-night script is created to help in such important scenarios. It uses Fits to convert the FITS date format into the Unix epoch time (number of seconds since 00:00:00 of January 1st, 1970), using the --datetosec option. The Unix epoch time is a single number (integer, if not given in sub-second precision), enabling easy comparison and sorting of dates after January 1st, 1970.

You can use this script as a basis for making a much more highly customized sorting script. Here are some examples