Results can be inserted into the input NDF (see Section 2.4.5), or else retained as a standalone FITS-WCS file (see Section 2.4.6). You can choose both, either, or even choose neither and throw the results away (strange person!).
The FITS files which autoastrom produces are in fact
generated by ASTROM. As discussed in SUN/5, these employ a slight extension to the
FITS-WCS standards, since they necessarily include distortion
information which has been deferred until paper~III, which is
still at present (August 2003) in draft. Nonetheless, they
are perfectly conformant. If, however, autoastrom had to be
configured with support for an old version of
AST, then it might have had to
generate FITS headers which conformed to the drafts of
paper~II, and thus do not conform to the final version --
such FITS files should not be used outside of this
application, and it would be best to update your version of
AST to a current one, and reinstall autoastrom.
The calculated astrometry is inserted into the input NDF
unless you suppress it with the --noinsert
option. If you need to insert this by hand, into this or
another NDF, you can do so with KAPPA's wcscopy command (you may need to
initialise the CONVERT
package, so that the conversions between FITS and NDF will happen
automatically).
For further details, see the FITS standard
[nost-100-2], and the two published
FITS-WCS papers, [fitswcs1] and
[fitswcs2]; the web pages which cover the
FITS-WCS process are at
<http://www.cv.nrao.edu/fits/documents/wcs/wcs.html>.