[fitsbits] Abuse of EXTEND keyword
Phil Hodge
hodge at stsci.edu
Fri Aug 24 14:03:05 EDT 2007
> What will be a file with no extension in your convention ?
>
> - no keyword at all
> - EXTEND=F and no NEXTEND kwd
> - EXTEND=F and NEXTEND=0
> - EXTEND=T and NEXTEND=0
For HST data we write NEXTEND in files that are supposed to have
extensions, and in that case it's useful in that it tells a calibration
program how many exposures (for example) to expect. A utility program
might not even look for NEXTEND.
A program that expects data in extensions would typically use a default
value if the NEXTEND keyword were absent. If NEXTEND = 0, there's no
data to process. EXTEND is almost always ignored.
Phil
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