[fitsbits] ADASS FITS BoF ? {External}

[Seaman, Robert Lewis - (rseaman)]

One week gone, one to go before the BoF deadline…

Feel free to forward this to other FITS fora.

Rob



On 8/21/23, 8:17 PM, "Seaman, Robert Lewis - (rseaman)" wrote:

Howdy, Friends of FITS,

Registration is open for ADASS XXXIII (click through from https://adass2023.lpl.arizona.edu).

The deadline for proposing Birds-of-a-Feather (BoF) sessions is fast approaching on September 1. Are there volunteers to organize this year’s FITS BoF? As LOC chair, I’ll have to beg off from submitting the abstract.

This FAQ answer for a popular astrophotography package may serve as a conversation starter for the agenda:

 4.6 Why has the FITS format been deprecated in PixInsight?


FITS is an obsolete, inefficient and poorly defined format. It is a source of endless interoperability problems. In our opinion, the blind adoption of the FITS format may be the worst mistake made by the astronomy community.

We have created the XISF format because we need a contemporary, really extensible, efficient, interoperable and well defined file format. For more information, see the XISF resources page<http://pixinsight.com/xisf/> on our website and the XISF Version 1.0 Specification<http://pixinsight.com/doc/docs/XISF-1.0-spec/XISF-1.0-spec.html> document.

Perhaps a focus on practical issues like:


·         How to encourage broader and more efficient library support for FITS

·         Developing translation tools such as XISF <-> FITS

·         A schema mapping FITS header keywords to binary table extensions

·         Evaluating additional algorithms for FITS tile compression

If some would prefer an astronomical data format BoF broader than FITS, I might suggest two separate abstracts with the notion of scheduling these as back-to-back sessions. Which is to say that I reject the premises of the FAQ above, but even if I didn’t, FITS requires ongoing maintenance whatever new formats come along.

Rob

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listmgr.nrao.edu/pipermail/fitsbits/attachments/20230828/a3598c11/attachment.html>