[fitsbits] ADASS FITS BoF on Sunday

[Clive Page]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2004, William Pence wrote:

> Please let me know if you have ideas for other topics (regardless of
> whether you plan to attend the meeting).

I shall not be at ADASS, unfortunately, but one topic raised on this list
recently is of interest to me: whether we can overcome the limits implied
by 32-bit integers.

With the help of Bill and his colleagues at GSFC I was able to build a
version of cFITSIO which handled files of over 2 GB, but I think a 2
gigarow limit in tables may be enforced by the presence of implicitly
32-bit signed integers for NAXIS2 (etc.) in the headers.  It would be
interesting to know whether any other people have an interest in extending
FITS beyond the 32-bit limit, and whether they have ideas to help solve
it.

Regards

-- 
Clive Page
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester,
Leicester, LE1 7RH,  U.K.