[fitsbits] Re: Reading floating point FITS files

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2003-11-25T17:55:57 +1100, Mark Calabretta hath writ:
> it work as a greyscale?  No.  Clearly the use of colour in this, and the
> many other images like it that are starting to appear regularly, is more
> than just aesthetic.  It effectively provides a way of visualizing a
> third dimension in the data.  The particular use-case I suggested was to
> overlay a celestial coordinate grid on it.  Try getting PhotoShop to do
> that!

I note that Mark's wcslib is available under the GPL and LGPL.  Is not
the point of this that anyone is permitted to embed wcslib into an
Adobe PhotoShop plugin so that it can overlay celestial coordinates?

On Tue 2003-12-02T10:44:40 +1100, Mark Calabretta hath writ:
> You would almost always want to do that anyway because the general public
> cannot be expected to have ready access to FITS viewers.  However, that
> is not the point.

I would like to think that the general public will have ready access
to FITS viewers because, as a result of such plugins, their generic
image viewers will also be FITS viewers.  That is at least part of the
goal of the FITS MIME Internet Drafts.

The MIME draft is now going into another phase of detailed review
about exactly what image/fits should and should not admit.

If we define it, I hope they will come.

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 831 459 3046     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla
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