[fitsbits] Re: Reading floating point FITS files

[Thierry Forveille]

Mark Calabretta writes:
 > >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? 
 > 
 > Thierry,
 > 
 > jpeg, or the printout, would be the final product; further processing of
 > the data would be difficult.  In particular, the coordinate information
 > is retained in a rather inaccessible form, and the data values are only
 > partially recoverable.  In fact, the coordinate graticule would obscure
 > some of the data.
 > 
Sure, but how many users are there that care about the data values/detailed 
coordinate information and that would not want to play with their own
colour tables? My guess is that there are large constituencies for each
capability but that they are mostly disjoint. They might even be the same
person by the way, just not at the same time: I am glad to use nicely
prepackaged pictures for my classes, but for my research where I use the
full data I'd play with the colours anyways to look for additional 
structure. Most astronomical datasets have more information than can be
displayed on a screen no matter how smart the lookup table choice, so
we'd just make one particular reasonable choice. That's fine if it
can be done (very) simply, but otherwise I'd rather stick to jpeg (or
postscript, or whatever) stored next to the fits file on the web site.