[fitsmime] changes induced by Arnold Rots

[Steve Allen]

I have modified the Internet Draft in response incorporating most of
the suggestions from Arnold Rots.  Several sections have become more
general than they were, and the document is better overall.

The changes do induce two new sets of questions to be posed here.

First, the "Contributors" section now gives credit to many members
from this discussions list.  Please let me know if I have missed
anyone or if anyone does not want to be listed.  I am also unsure how
formal the affiliations for everyone should be, and I suspect that I
may have mistaken some of them.  Corrections are most welcome.

Second, the note from Arnold suggested that the tabular event lists
which the high energy community uses to store sparse images deserved
mention.  I have added commentary to the draft which asks this:

   It would be kind of nice to add another paragraph which points at
   various documents that describe particular usages of FITS files
   which are commonly exchanged among various sub-disciplines of
   astronomy.  For example, the binary table format used for photon
   event lists by high energy astronomy is described by
   http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/ofwg/docs/events/ogip_94_003/ogip_94_003.html

   From my own experience I should be able to point at a document that
   describes various usages of putting CCD mosaic data into FITS
   files.

   Partly these would be examples of the unsolved problems of FITS
   semantics, but moreso they could be guides for implementors who
   might want to teach their applications to display more kinds of data.

   Are there other documents pertaining to various sorts of FITS usage
   which deserve to be mentioned here?

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 831 459 3046     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla
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