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

[William Thompson]

On 06/24/15 10:16, Lucio Chiappetti wrote:
> On Wed, 24 Jun 2015, Mark Taylor wrote:
...
>> is all there in CFITSIO, but that can't be used directly by non-C-friendly
>> languages such as java, javascript, and who knows
>
> is Fortran C-friendly ? or idl ? I would not engage myself in supporting ZIMAGE
> or ZTABLE directly, not even in java ... I guess it won't be very efficient.
> Although if somebody writes a class for a Rice (or PLIO or HCOMPRESS) stream
> (gzip *is* supported) the problem can be nicely isolated.

I would like to point out that NASA's Solar Dynamic Observatory is currently 
using the "ZIMAGE" convention heavily to handle their terabytes/day data volume. 
  They have implemented readers in IDL which can read these compressed files. 
This software is distributed to users via SolarSoft in the usual manner, and is 
thus basically invisible to the user.

-- 
William Thompson
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Code 671
Greenbelt, MD  20771
USA

301-286-2040
William.T.Thompson at nasa.gov