FITS in Rust

Simple Rust libraries to process FITS files. See and FITS at NASA/GFSC and FITS - Wikipedia.

Brief overview

Cover the objective and goals of the series.

Intro to a subset of Rust that we will use

* Cargo and rustup (stable vs nightly etc) and running our first Rust program
* Functions, control flow, looping
* Structs and method dispatch
* Enums
* Parameterising Enums and Structs
* Error handling basics
* Testing and benchmarking in Rust
* Concurrency primitives, especially channels and message passing
* Std library functions we might be interested in, file and directory handling etc

Parsing FITS files

* Simple file handling in Rust
* Parse FITS v4 files
* Simple - Header and HDUs
* Intermediate - Add functionality to inspect headers and HDUs
* Advanced - Return more metadata and other FITS detail

Display FITS files

* Use a cross platform crate to do UI?
* Render binary / images
* Add a view into other data types, e.g. tabular data

Going faster

* Benchmarking existing functions
* Comparing to astro.py FITS capability
* Making the code go faster

Processing and updating FITS files

* Updating FITS files
* Creating new FITS files

Advanced topics

* Enhance the code to do what it can currently do in parallel (whatever is embarrassingly parallel)
* Handing FITS files that don’t fit into available system memory, i.e. memory mapping
* Working with compressed FITS files
* Validating FITS files