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

[Steve Allen]

On Sun 2007-08-26T22:26:09 -0700, Rob Seaman hath writ:
> For the proper means, you might download a copy of Ximtool or DS9 to
> reverse engineer the common techniques, the representational language
> (perhaps start with "window and stretch") and the graphical tools
> (histogram vectors are more expressive than scalar gammas, for
> instance).

I'm surprised to see Rob not referring to the IRAF source code, for
there are FITS files which contain a 2-d array in which each row
is a spectrum.  In that case the proper display is a series of x-y
plots showing spectral intensity as a function of some sort of
wavelength.

The X-ray satellites tend to put their image data into tables.
The fv tool from HEASARC can present these as images as well as
via other sorts of database-like queries.

The radio observations have many formats, some of the earlies of which
are 3-d -- a stack of 2-d images where each layer represents a
different polarization.  In that case the code to look at is AIPS and
its kin.

I'm still not getting the underlying driver for the project.

Perhaps the most pertinent question is whether there is any particular
source of FITS files which is most relevant for this proprietary tool.

--
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