[fitsbits] Re: FITS for Image Archiving?

[Juergen Liesmann]

Hi Patrick 

> I am part of a library group that intends to make high resolution scans
> of classic biblical studies materials. The question arose yesterday at a
> planning meeting on the format that should be used for archiving the
> images. I am only vaguely familiar with FITS but it seems a likely
> candidate since it is a non-proprietary format and has a wide spread
> user base.

FITS is a good format if you need more than 8 bits per pixels and colour.
But you need many space on disk.

If 8 bits are enough I would prefer tiff or JPEG. Tiff and JPEG
are non-proprietary formats too. And you find many tools to work
with this.

> Finally, is there any software available for
> conversion from say tiff format to FITS?

I have a image processing software laid out for amateur astronomers,
including some special features for video-astronomy.
For the next release i have a import-function for GIF and JPEG.
The next release will into 2 or 3 weeks come. You can see (and get) the
actual relase on my homepage, but in german only. The next release
comes in english too.

-- 
Juergen Liesmann
http://www.ra-dec.de
Email: liesmann at t-online.de