[fitsbits] 16-bit floats {External}

[Thomas Robitaille]

Hi everyone,

As far as I understand, IEEE 754-2008 standardized the representation of
16-bit floats (as well as 128-bit floats). I was curious whether there is
any interest in extending the FITS format to allow BITPIX=-16 and
BITPIX=-128?

I am aware of some modern projects that would benefit from having 16-bit
floats, since they consider it to be sufficient in precision to store very
large datasets, and using 16-bit floats would perform a lot better than
using compression on 32-bit floats for example, and 16-bit floats would
allow a larger dynamic range than using 16-bit ints with BSCALE/BZERO.

I'm curious to hear if this has been discussed before!

Thanks,
Tom
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