[R] New FITS file utility package

[Andrew Harris]

Greetings --

This is a note mainly for astronomers searching r-help in search of FITS 
file utilities (FITS is the Flexible Image Transport System, an active 
file format standard that many astronomical observatories use for storing 
image and tabular data).  No reply is needed.

There is now a package that reads the most common file types and writes 
images to and from R internal data.  I am happy to help extend it to less 
comon types as need surfaces.

The package name is FITSio.  As Duncan Murdoch predicted in an r-help 
years ago, the native R stream functions work just fine to pull apart the 
headers and data in the file.

Many thanks to the R core development team for developing and supporting 
such an excellent program for data exploration and analysis.

Andrew Harris
Universisty of Maryland