This equal area projection shows an entire sphere with a minimum of distortion by projecting it onto the six faces of a cube. The faces are stored as the third dimension of the image and numbered, contrary to the 1-based FITS convention, 0-5 as shown in the diagram above. This projection was developed to archive data from the COBE (COsmic Background Explorer) satellite.
SIMPLE = T / file does conform to FITS standard BITPIX = -32 / number of bits per data pixel NAXIS = 3 / number of data axes NAXIS1 = 128 / length of data axis 1 NAXIS2 = 128 / length of data axis 2 NAXIS3 = 6 / length of data axis 3 CTYPE1 = 'RA---CSC' CTYPE2 = 'DEC--CSC' CTYPE3 = 'CUBEFACE' CRPIX1 = 64.5 / reference pixel CRPIX2 = 64.5 / reference pixel CRVAL1 = 0.0 / reference pixel value CRVAL2 = 0.0 / reference pixel value CDELT1 = -0.703125 / degrees/pixel CDELT2 = 0.703125 / degrees/pixel[FITS World Coordinate Systems] [World Coordinate Systems]