[fitsbits] 16-bit floats {External}

[Barrett, Paul]

Yes, definitely. I have been advocating for half-precision (16-bit)
floating point for several years now for radio astronomy. In addition,
128-bit floats are likely to be useful for timing in the next decade or so,
when optical and nuclear clocks come on line with precisions of <10^-20 s.

We should anticipate the need for such data types now and in the future.

 -- Paul


On Wed, Jul 23, 2025 at 8:35 AM Thomas Robitaille via fitsbits <
fitsbits at listmgr.nrao.edu> wrote:

> 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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