[fitsbits] Re: Reading floating point FITS files

[Don Wells]

Mark, Steve, etal,

Mark Calabretta writes:
 > ..  The aim is simply to store a colour image in a standard way,
 > something which FITS currently cannot do! ..

The prior discussion in this thread was concerned with the possibility
of defining WCS-related conventions for encoding color images in FITS
primary HDUs and IMAGE extensions.  There is another way that we could
support inclusion of color imagery in FITS files: we could agree to
permit XTENSION='JPEG', XTENSION='TIFF', XTENSION='GeoTiff',
XTENSION='PNG', etc.  The XTENSION mechanism enables FITS to wrap up
any data object[*] and declare its type.  Data types which have
standard MIME codes are sufficiently well defined that they can be
regarded as suitable for long-term archival storage.

-Don Wells

[*] The XTENSION mechanism will even permit us to agree to use
    XTENSION='FITS', as Perry Greenfield pointed out two years ago.
-- 
  Donald C. Wells    Scientist - GBT-PTCS Project     dwells at nrao.edu
                    http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-434-296-0277
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