HelioFITS

Instant solar FITS previews

Only for Mac

Free

Mac

HelioFITS teaches Finder to read solar FITS files. Press Space on any .fits file and it renders instantly — in the correct instrument colormap, drawn from the sunpy standard. SDO/AIA, HMI magnetograms, LASCO, SUVI, EIT, STEREO, PUNCH, K-Cor, TRACE, XRT and more are recognized from the header; nothing to configure. Built by a solar physicist, for the archive already sitting on your disk. COORDINATES YOU CAN TRUST Hover any pixel and read its value together with its helioprojective coordinate (Tx, Ty) and its distance from disk center in solar radii. The world-coordinate solution does the real spherical deprojection — TAN, ARC, SIN and CAR — honors CUNIT, the PC and CD matrices and CROTA2, and is pinned against astropy in the test suite. It refuses to guess: a projection it cannot handle produces no readout rather than a plausible wrong number. MEASURE WITHOUT LEAVING FINDER Drag a box to get mean, median, sigma, sum, min and max over the region at full native resolution, with a histogram. Toggle the solar limb. Adjust the stretch live — percentile clip, gamma, log — without touching the file. MULTI-EXTENSION FILES, HANDLED Scroll to blink between HDUs, pixel-registered, to compare processing levels or filters. Overlay a running difference. Pin which HDU a folder should show — first, last, or a specific one — and every preview, thumbnail and icon follows. Rice-compressed and .fz files work natively. METADATA IN THE FINDER Telescope, instrument, wavelength, observation date, exposure, dimensions and HDU count appear in Get Info, and are Spotlight-searchable. BACK TO PYTHON IN ONE CLICK Copy a sunpy snippet that loads exactly the HDU you are looking at. Export any HDU to PNG for slides and papers, or convert a whole folder at once. Free. No account, no network, no telemetry — HelioFITS has no networking code at all. Sandboxed, and it only ever reads the files you point it at. HelioFITS previews solar FITS files in Finder and Quick Look. HelioFITS Studio, a separate free download, is the full desktop application for working with coronagraph and wide-field solar imagery.

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• Opening HelioFITS now opens the viewer: drop a FITS file on it, or click Open…. The welcome page appears beside it until you tick “Don’t show this again”, and the layer settings moved to Settings (⌘,). • The viewer can show its file in Finder (⇧⌘R) and copy its full path (⌥⌘C). • Copy Python now names the array (data = m.data) and, with RHEF on, reproduces the filter with sunkit-image.

Version 1.4.0

The developer, CHRISTOPHER RAYMOND GILBERT, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .

  • Data Not Collected

    The developer does not collect any data from this app.

    Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

    Accessibility

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    Information

    Seller
    CHRISTOPHER RAYMOND GILBERT
    Size
    3.2 MB
    Category
    Utilities
    Compatibility
    Requires macOS 14.5 or later.
    • Mac
      Requires macOS 14.5 or later.
    Languages
    English
    Age Rating
    4+
    Copyright
    © 2026 Dr. Chris Gilly
  • Privacy Policy