Draft of FITS standard revision 1.2 available for comment

[Lucio Chiappetti]

> All comments should be mailed to the fitsbits exploder at
> fitsbits at fits.cv.nrao.edu, or posted to the newsgroup sci.astro.fits. 

  Here they are.

First of all I would commend the very useful work done in providing a
comprehensive and up to date view of the standard, and in particular I feel
that having it on line on the Web, in a very friendly way to consult, is
great. [I look forward to the pleasure to tell to somebody, 'look your
program is wrong, see http://.....' :-) ]

Therefore the comments are minor


General

I endorse Don Wells comment that the revised standard shall somehow be
also published on a journal (probably a supplement series).

General

deprecated feature shall be hilighted in the text (e.g. boldface, on 
standalone lines)

1.2 Scope

would it be the right time to freeze and discourage use of some of the earlier
extensions (random groups and ASCII tables) which are no longer justified ?

4.3.1

just for clarity redefine here a "card image" as an 80-byte card image.

4.3.2

in describing array storage order, a note that this is the storage order used
by Fortran would be useful.

4.5

are these special records really necessary ?


node53.html : NAXISn Keywords

"A value of zero for any of the NAXISn signifies that no data follow the
header in the HDU. If NAXIS is equal to 0, there should not be any NAXISn
keywords." 

is this not somewhat redundant and confusing, since already a NAXIS "value of
zero signifies that no data follow the header in the HDU." ?


http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/documents/nost_1.2/node56.html
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/documents/nost_1.2/node57.html

the description of the XTENSION Keyword should more properly appear in the
second of these pages


TELESCOPE and INSTRUME

is it worth clarifying that for space missions TELESCOPE is the spacecraft
and INSTRUME a combination of eventual optics systems and detector ?


6.3

the text is not clear about the endianness of the IEEE data, while we know
this is a critical item. A reference table in appendix about the most common
OS usages should be useful.


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