The Creative Appropriation of a Scientific Software: The FITS Liberator, a Case Study

To create astronomical “pretty pictures” with data acquired in professional observatories such as the James Webb and the Hubble space telescopes, scientists, image processors, and other users of this type of data need to master their idiosyncratic file format, the Flexible Image Transport System, or FITS format. For nearly 20 years, one software has aligned many of the actors who create the images we see everywhere online, on television, and in the newspapers: the FITS Liberator. The user-friendly FITS Liberator software was designed to free the data from its closed accessibility in the FITS format and allow a wider public to use astronomical data to visualize outer space in a creative fashion. Among other users, a network of amateur astronomers have creatively appropriated this tool to produce beautiful colour images they share online. Amateurs collectively negotiate the norms of their practices of production and sharing of astronomical pretty pictures made with FITS data through their use of specialized digital tools. FITS Liberator offers an insightful view of the social ordering of amateurs’ practices because of its development as a means of communication of professional data for non-professionals, but also because its use was mediated by amateur astronomers. This chapter shows that the integration of the use of the software in amateurs’ workflows to create their images and the transmission of the knowledge they acquired through their experimentation with the tool—alongside the distribution of their pictures—contributed to the success of the software as an actor in the democratization of professional astronomical data.