[ugh]

The image in the article is also not really low-res. As far as I can see Stereo’s CCDs have a resolution of 2048x2048, the image in the press release is 1280x720, that’s not exactly a substantial reduction (also considering that the two images from the two spacecraft were heavily distorted to create this side-view of the sun).

By the way, I found this wiki about processing and analyzing SECCHI’s images, if you wanted to you could presumably learn about it and start processing images on your own: http://secchi.nrl.navy.mil/wiki/pmwiki.php?n=Main.DataProces...

[novas0x2a]

If you install CFITSIO[1], you can rebuild GDAL with FITS support. GDAL is the crazy-format swiss army knife. Some caveats[2] apply, though.

1) http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/fitsio/fitsio.htm...

2) http://www.gdal.org/frmt_various.html#FITS