FITS to ASDF conversion tool?

[drdavella]

Inspired in part by this awesome article from an interesting blog:

The only strategy in getting people to switch to your product is to eliminate barriers. Imagine that it’s 1991. The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You’re the product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow?

s/spreadsheet/astronomical data format/ and s/Lotus 123/FITS/ and s/Microsoft Excel/ASDF/ and maybe it makes sense.

[perrygreenfield]

There is already, sort of, depending on how you look at things. There is support for putting FITS in ASDF with a view that round-tripping doesn't lose any FITS info (like header comments). But perhaps there should be a mode of making FITS more natural ASDF (and not round-trippable). The point about allowing backward conversion is quite valid. It can't easily be done in general, but something could be done for a subset of cases (or with explicit restrictions on what is supported). (Perhaps the infinitely nested FITS as the equivalent of nested YAML? Clumsy? Yes. Very Clumsy.)

[pllim]

I just spent 10 mins combing the docs for this exact feature. I wanted a ASDF.from_fits class method to quickly get an ASDF object I can play with using an existing FITS image/table. Please make it happen.