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

[THIERRY FORVEILLE]

> > 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?
> 
> I have never encountered compressed tables in the wild.  If I had to guess,
> this
> is in part because the documentation for the convention was not easy to come
> by
> until recently.  It was not available on the registered FITS conventions
> website, or at least, I never noticed it.  Nobody has every asked for support
> in
> PyFITS or Astropy.
> 
Another contributing factor most likely is that tables tend to be rather 
smaller than images, removing some of the motivation for compressing them. 
There are certainly some very big tables around so this is not without 
exceptions, but in many projects that deliver both images and tables
the latter are at least an order of magnitude smaller.