[fitsbits] Endian state of multibyte Binary Data in FITS files

[Tom McGlynn]

Milton Aupperle wrote:
...
> Can anyone suggest a URL where I can find out about how to indicate or
> determine what Endian multibyte data is in?
...

All FITS data are big-endian.  This is described at the beginning
of section 6 in the FITS standard:

   Primary and extension data shall be represented in one of the formats described in this
   section. FITS data shall be interpreted to be a byte stream. Bytes are in order of
   decreasing signicance. The byte that includes the sign bit shall be first, and the byte
   that has the ones bit shall be last.

	Regards,
	Tom McGlynn


[P.S., Aside for the FITS lawyers:
I'm not sure the last phrase is written very well.
It's not clear to me what the 'ones' bit
is for floating point data.  It could be interpreted as
the bit that is multiplying 2^0 and that can occur in any
of the bytes of an IEEE number or none.  I'm not sure
what else it would mean for real numbers.  The phrasing apparently
just has integers in mind.]