[fitsbits] Maximum number of extensions

[Clive Page]

In article <mailman.1053465781.8265.fitsbits at listmgr.cv.nrao.edu>,
Peter Teuben  <teuben at astro.umd.edu> wrote:

>what's there from preventing making your own keyword in the pHDU
>and call it NUMHDU. 

Nothing, of course.  But that doesn't solve the basic problem that you can
only find HDU number N by scanning the headers of each preceding HDU to
find the length of each of their data sections.  

Of course there's nothing to stop you inserting an index, with say byte
offset, to each HDU in say HDU number 1. The whole thing would still be a
FITS file, but that's more than a trivial amount of work to implement it.



-- 
Clive Page   cgp <at sign> le.ac.uk