[fitsbits] Question(s) regarding development of proprietary FITS manipulation software. . .

[Maren Purves]

Michael,

it's not graphics, it's data.
Well described reducible data.
You can't get much physics out of just images.

Aloha,
Maren

gberz3 wrote:
> Thanks Maren.  One question I suppose I've just forgotten to ask:  Is
> there anything particularly special about the actual graphics content
> of a FITS file?  Or is it perhaps simply a glorified TIFF or JPEG of
> some sort?
> 
> Regards,
> Michael
> 
> On Aug 4, 11:09 pm, Maren Purves <m.pur... at jach.hawaii.edu> wrote:
>> On Fri, 3 Aug 2007, gberz3 wrote:
>>> So far, I've really only looked at the CFITSIO items and it's very
>>> well documented (really too well) but the function names don't seem
>>> very intuitive.  I'm sure they mean a lot more to someone familiar
>>> with FITS, but I'm absolutely not.  It's basically like someone in
>>> 1989 asking you to write a JPEG file manipulation program.  Sure the
>>> information exists, but with 0 familiarity you'll need a lot of input.
>> there used to be a file called longnames.h ...