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The IAU FITS Working Group has issued
a draft of a new version of the FITS Standard document that includes
descriptions of the new features that have been officially added to
the FITS format since
the publication of the previous version of the document. The 8
main new features are:<br>
<ol>
<li>
Conventions for representing Time world coordinates
</li>
<li>
The CONTINUE keyword for representing long string keyword values
over
multiple header records
</li>
<li>
A convention for preallocating scratch space in a FITS header
which is then
available for future use when appending new keywords to the
header
</li>
<li>
The INHERIT keyword to indicate whether or not the current
extension should inherit
the keywords in the primary header
</li>
<li>
The CHECKSUM and DATASUM keywords for verifying the veracity of
the contents of
the file
</li>
<li>
The TLMINn and TLMAXn keywords for specifying the minimum and
maximum values in
table columns
</li>
<li>
The Green Bank convention for expanding header keywords into
table column entries when
the value varies row-by-row
</li>
<li>
Conventions for compressing FITS images and tables
</li>
</ol>
A draft version of this document is available at
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_standard.html">http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_standard.html</a>. An index to all the
new features can be found in appendix H.3. <br>
<br>
A full release of this document is expected later in 2016, pending
possible minor editorial corrections to the text. Please report any
typographical errors or suggestions for improving the clarity of the
text to the Lucio Chiappetti (lucio "at" lambrate.inaf.it).<br>
<br>
Bill Pence<br>
on behalf of the IAU FITS Working Group<br>
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