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

[Steve Allen]

On Mon 2007-08-27T11:32:19 -0400, Michael Williams hath writ:
> we're obviously speaking terribly different languages here.

We are also not managing to communicate that FITS has been in use
for nearly 30 years.  It does work for exchanging pictures
of the sky, catalogs of the sky, and other related information.

In most cases the data transmitted via FITS are still tightly coupled
with the peculiar characteristics of the instruments which were used
to acquire them.  In astronomy those instruments literally cover a
very wide spectrum -- from the detection of the weak electric field
propagated with ensembles of radio photons to the almost audible ping
when individual gamma ray photons hit their detector.

Over those 30 years there have probably been thousands of person-years
of effort developing the software which interprets the information in
the FITS files.  That may be a major point of disconnect here.

> 1)  Is a FITS file really similar to, say, a Microsoft Word
> document. . .in that it can store *any* kind of data (images, mp3s,
> pdfs, minivans) with the only thing that can be counted on being the
> "standard" header?

There is an IRAF package which does exactly that.  It serves a purpose
akin to tar when feeding ensembles of files into a pipeline which is
designed to handle FITS.

> Are the images
> literally live pictures that were taken, or some arbitrary graphical
> representation of data?

Yes, but in optical astronomy the first notion is usually a safe one.

> 3) How do I determine what type of image manipulations are legitimate
> for any type of image data?  Should I allow sepia toning?  Should I
> allow them to run photoshop filters on the pictures?  I mean, what,
> really is the usefulness of any manipulation on the image and what
> are the most common techniques?

In the most general sense the answers to these questions count as the
fulfillment of the requirements for PhD theses and refereed scientific
literature.
	"If we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be research."

> 4) What is the goal of scientists when it comes to examining
> another's FITS files?  What kind of "information" is truly gathered
> from the "data"?

This is science.

--
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