Fips: An OpenGL based FITS viewer

Abstract FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) is a common format for astronomical data storage. It was first standardised in the early 1980s (Wells and Greisen, 1981). Even though astronomical data is now processed mostly using software, visual data inspection by a human is still important during equipment or software commissioning and while observing. We present Fips , 1  a cross-platform FITS file viewer open source software (Kornilov and Malanchev, 2018). To the best of our knowledge, it is for the first time that the image rendering algorithms are implemented mostly on GPU (graphics processing unit). We show that it is possible to implement a fully-capable FITS viewer using OpenGL (Segal and Akeley, 2018) interface. We also emphasise the advantages of using GPUs for efficient image handling.