Fitsio provides an easy to use object-oriented API including providing a Numpy interface to FITS files read from CFITSIO. It allows direct access to the columns of a FITS binary table which can be useful for reading large fits files. Compared to astropy.io.fits, this package is closer to the underlying cfitsio library.

Fitsio also exposes a microlanguage (implemented in CFITSIO) for making efficient SQL-like queries of tables (single tables only though–no joins or anything like that).

This is the Python 2 package.