[fitsbits] Rendering FITS Data

[Doug Mink]

Grinder wrote:
> 
> For astronomers, what are some of the more useful data-to-color
> transformations?  I'm having difficulty resolving
> domain-specific vocabulary, so I hope I'm not being
> confusing -- it has certainly stymied my attempts to google
> this information.

As one of those who just got back from ADASS in Strasbourg, I'll
add the ways which the venerable SAOimage program (which I maintain
at http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/saoimage/ ) converts from
FITS input data to 8-bit display pixels.  It supports linear
(a linear scale from the minimum value at 0 and the maximum at 256),
square root, log, wrap (which produces a sort of contour image),
and histogram.  The histogram can be clipped at the ends to emphasize
the middle values.  All of the code is in C in the sclmap.c file
of the source code which is available through the page cited above.

-Doug Mink
 Telescope Data Center
 Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
 Cambridge, Massachusetts USA