compressed fits format

[Arnold Rots]

We skirted the issue by gzipping all our FITS files ...

  - Arnold Rots
    RXTE-GOF, GSFC

> 
> Dear all fitsers...
> I am sorry to post this here since I guess it may be a question
> which appear every 2 weeks ( ? ).
> Is there any standard for compressed fits files ?.
> I am about to include two modes of compression on our images, one
> with a lossless algorithm ( storage of the difference between 2 16
> bits pixels on a single byte, I presume this well known algorithm
> has even a name... ), and a lossy one after the one used for
> the digitised sky survey ( using H transform ). I assume I am not
> the only one who has to take care of more than 1 gigabytes of images
> per night, and would like to know is there are standard FITS keywords
> describing these compression ( COMPRESS = T ? )
> We decided it was much better to perform real time processing of the
> data, then compress it by a factor of 10 and store it on CD ROMs ( which
> would then hold about a week of observations ) rather than to store
> everything on tape which cannot be read after 3 years... and would
> prefer to conform to some kind of standard if there is such a thing.
> Alain
> 
> 
>