[fitsbits] reopening of Public Comment Period on the compression conventions

[Demitri Muna]

Hi,

Thanks for the replies; it’s good to see different ways how people are using data. I’m not inherently opposed to lossy compression - it’s up to the data provider to decide how to provide the data, and that can mean providing compressed data as the archival or reduced data. My concern is tying the format to a particular compression scheme, particularly given how often the format is updated. Will the decompression software be part of the monolithic cfitsio, or will (can) FITS have dependencies (e.g. zlib)? I did note the ZCMPTYPE keyword.

I assume that in the case of a compressed table or image that one could still seek to the byte offset of the data start, know from the header where the byte offset to the end of the data is, read that chunk and decompress it in memory?

Finally, can there be a routine (which could be wrapped by but not strictly written as a command line program) that will take a FITS file and rewrite it into an compressed/uncompressed format, either by specifying the HDUs or for all applicable HDUs?

Cheers,
Demitri

_________________________________________
Demitri Muna

Department of Astronomy
Il Ohio State University

Home page: http://muna.com

My Projects:
http://nightlightapp.io
http://trillianverse.org
http://scicoder.org


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