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

[Mark Taylor]

On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, Mandel, Eric wrote:

> >
> > How interesting.  I'm not sure if your experience argues for or
> > against the incorporation of tile compression in the standard.
> 
> 
> For me as a developer, tiled compression already is part of the standard:
> the very first email we got after announcing release 1 of JS9 (October
> 2014) was a complaint that it did not  handle rice-compressed tiled
> images.  I eventually came to the conclusion that cfitsio *was* the
> practical standard, at least for anyone trying to write software for the
> community at large. I know Bill Joye has spent a lot of time implementing
> tiled compression in DS9 (which does not use cfitsio), just because of
> widespread demand.

I don't deal much with images, but interestingly, I have never
had complaints or requests concerning use of tile-compressed FITS
tables in STIL/STILTS/TOPCAT.  That suggests that tile compression
for table data is much less used than for image data.  Can anybody
comment on whether that's the case?

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/