From @embray on July 17, 2014 21:36

See #51. A nocopy argument would allow a table HDU to be created from an existing recarray or FITS_rec without copying the data in the array--reusing the existing array.

Otherwise, if the columns are not already arranged contiguously in memory, the data must be copied. If nocopy=True but the data must be copied, an exception should be raised

Original ticket: https://aeon.stsci.edu/ssb/trac/pyfits/ticket/87

Copied from original issue: spacetelescope/PyFITS#80