Question about a fits header

[William Thompson]

seaman at noao.edu (Rob Seaman) writes:

>Bill Wyatt (wyatt at cfahub.harvard.edu) writes:

	(stuff deleted)

>Does anybody have an official copy of the ISO 8601 standard that they
>can bring to the ADASS meeting?  We may want to consult it before we adopt
>it into FITS...  Hopefully the standard itself is more clear about issues
>like omitting leading zeroes than the summaries are.

>One concern I have about the ISO standards is that it is rather hard to 
>find a copy without buying one yourself.  For instance, the University
>of Arizona library doesn't appear to have a copy.  There may not be a
>copy anywhere in Tucson - or Arizona, for that matter.  On the other
>hand, the FITS standard has been propagated around the world wherever
>there are copies of the A&A Supplements - or you can just get the
>documents off the web.

Yes, the ISO-8601 standard costs money, but I believe that the CCSDS
recommendation, which is a restricted subset of ISO-8601, is free.  I've posted
that recommendation in the past.  In any case, it's probably better to restrict
the ISO-8601 standard to a sane subset, rather than try to implement
everything.

Bill Thompson