[fitsbits] The Vatican adopts FITS

[Rob Seaman]

Lots of interesting issues here:

We have other good reasons to pursue a FITS standard for multicolor encodings.  Absent that, one could quite robustly place RGB (or other decompositions) into separate extensions of an MEF.  It looks like they often record UV or other non-visible data as well, to record palimpsests, etc.

The header metadata issues are simpler in some ways and more complex in others relative to astronomical data.

They would want to develop format translators to-and-from their internal archival format and whatever formats are popular during a particular decade or century.  They might also want to directly support their archival format (FITS or otherwise) within display applications (and in other parts of the user workflow).

They might well choose to publish their format (FITS or otherwise) specifications in their own peer reviewed literature, just as we have.

There are historically interesting astronomical manuscripts, too, of course.

Jpeg is itself lossy - not obvious what the compression or general imaging requirements are for manuscripts versus other types of (non-astronomical) photography.  The noise model might differ in interesting ways from poisson statistics applicable to astronomical detectors.

OCR for illuminated manuscripts?  (I once wrote an OMR package in IRAF to score mark-sense forms.)

Rob