Eric Greisen wrote:
AIPS cannot handle HEALPIX but can someone ?

There is FORTRAN, C and IDL code for reading HEALPIX FITS files
available by registering at http://www.eso.org/science/healpix/. There
is also a IDL image display program MAPVIEW available from the WMAP
software library (http://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/product/map/m_sw.cfm).
This can be run without an IDL license using the IDL virtual machine
although this is somewhat cumbersome.

Calabretta & Greisen (2002, A&A, 395, 1077) originally described HealPix
as a pixelization which defines a distribution of points on the sphere
but which does not relate these to points in a plane of projection and
which therefore is outside the scope of WCS. But I was excited to see
Mark Calabretta's recent preprint "Mapping on the HealPix Grid"
available at astro-ph/0412607 which shows that Healpix *is* associated
with a map projection, which will incorporated in V3.7 (not yet
released?) of WCSLIB. I think this should eventually allow
astronomical display programs (DS9, AIPS) to convert Healpix maps to any
desired projection.

The LAMBDA data center plans to increase its use of Healpix FITS files
for CMB data, so it would be nice if these files were readable by the
major display programs.

--Wayne Landsman