[fitsbits] Proposed Changes to the FITS Standard

[Steve Allen]

On Fri 2007-08-17T12:13:57 -0700, Tim Pearson hath writ:
> Are there existing applications where a keyword can occur more than
> once with different values, in which more than just the last
> occurrence are intended to carry significant information?

In the instruments delivered to Keck by UCO/Lick and Caltech there
are repeated occurrences of keywords which not only have values,
but for which the data type of the value is different in the
different occurrences.

The information is significant, but only in the sense that it is a
dump of information which might be relevant to someone who is
debugging engineering aspects of the image data acquisition system
(and that's pretty much the explanation for why this atrocity
of poor form in database normalization exists in the first place).

To the extent that we share a common code base I have already
implemented the changes necessary to avoid such FITS files, but it
will have to be retrofitted and tested on each affected instrument.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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