Monday, 13-Aug-2001 14:56:21 EDT
My primary focus has been on getting our files converted and begining data reduction, so my solution is rather specialized to our particular needs. If time allows I plan to turn these programs into a generalized utility for SPE to FITS conversion. I've been using IDL 5.4 on a RedHat 6.2 machine, but these programs should work on most recent IDL implementaions. One of the programs depends on the IDL Astronomy Library.
The program read_princeton.pro reads some basic header information and all the image data from an SPE file.
NOTE: the comments at the top of this file need to be updated to reflect my changes to the code. In particular, the program now has some extra outputs, exposure, fulldate, and time. The date format given in the comments is no longer valid, either.
The program SPEtoFITS.pro is my script to do batch conversion of spe files. It does some specialized conversion of date strings that may break with other spe files. Our version of WinView wrote dates in a way that did not agree with the published specification. It also ignores specs on which exposure time value to use, and just uses the one that was right for our files. This program depends on the IDL Astronomy Library.
In this directory you can find before and after files, and a dump of the SPE header info, as provided by WinView.
I've found two cases where the published specifications (availible in an apendix to the Princteon Instruments "PC Interface Library Programming Manual") disagree with what WinView wrote to my file headers.