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

[THIERRY FORVEILLE]

"Douglas Tody" writes:
>  BINTABLE has its uses
> as well as a container, e.g., for generic conventional tables certainly,
> but also for tables that store spectra or smaller images like cutouts
> wherein the data segment can be represented as a array , but it is not
> ideal for large datasets containing arbitrary types of objects, each of
> which can be very large. 
Could you elaborate on what problems you see in BINTABLE being used as a 
container for individually large objects? I know of at least one case of
its being used for things that were fairly large at the time (~1kx1k images 
in the early 90s), but I may be missing some scaling issues that mean trouble
at some larger size...

Thierry