[fitsbits] Re: Reading floating point FITS files

[Thierry Forveille]

Mark Calabretta writes:
 > Look at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020920.html. 
 > Does this image contain astrophysical content?  Yes, phenomenal.  Would
 > 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!
 > 
Could you clarify what functionality an RGB FITS brings, compared to
introducing production of jpeg images as a printout option into the
major astronomy packages, which know about overlaid grids and the like? 
It might just be me being opaque, but that simpler solution would seem
to address the need you mention with much less complexity. Just think
of the burden of getting a proposal through all the FITS committees to
the IAU GA ;-)