If you have all your cards concatenated together into a single long string,
each occupying 80 characters (with no delimiters), you can insert them
into a FitsChan in a single call using
AST_PUTCARDS.
This call first empties the supplied FitsChan of any existing cards, then
inserts the new cards, and finally rewinds the FitsChan so that a
subsequent call to
AST_READ
will start reading from the first supplied card. The
AST_PUTCARDS routine uses AST_PUTFITS
internally to interpret and store each individual card, and so the
caveats in should be read.
AST A Library for Handling World Coordinate Systems in Astronomy