[fitsbits] start of Public Comment Period on compressed FITS image and tables

[William Pence]

Regarding the current usage of tile-compression of FITS binary tables, 
the FACT Cherenkov Telescope project has been producing such files since 
2011, as described in their paper (http://arxiv.org/abs/1506.06045) that 
was recently posted to arXiv.  They implemented a customized compression 
algorithm that is optimized for their particular data, but otherwise are 
producing FITS files that conform to the tiled table compression 
convention.  So far, they have archived more than 600 TB of raw data in 
this tiled table compression FITS format at the ISDC in Switzerland. 
They anticipate that this format will also be used when the next 
generation Cherenkov Telescope Array comes on line.

Also, they wrote their own data access layer in C++ to read and write 
the tile compressed tables, so this provides an independent software 
implementation in addition to CFITSIO.

-Bill

On 7/13/2015 9:57 AM, Mark Taylor wrote:
(...)
> can you confirm that you know of extensive use of FITS compression
> for *table*, as opposed to image, data?  Nobody else in this discussion
> seems to have presented any evidence or examples of tile-compressed FITS
> tables actually in use.  Given that, the set of arguments for adopting
> the Tiled Table Compression part of the proposed text (sec 10.3)
> would seem to be different than that for Tiled Image Compression
> (sec 10.1), since it seems clear that tile-compressed FITS images
> are already in wide usage.  But if you can cite extensive use of
> table compression as well, that's relevant information.
>
> Mark
>
> --
> Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
> m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/
>
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-- 
____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence    Astrophysicist     William.Pence at nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662     [Emeritus]       +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771                      +1-301-286-1684 (fax)