[fitswcs] Polarization codes

[Steve Allen]

On Thu 2008-03-13T17:19:07 +0000, Paddy Leahy hath writ:
> Hi Mark et al  (is anyone else reading these posts?)

As with Arnold, yes, but Lick only has one instrument designed to
measure polarization, and my radio days were 25 years ago.

At the current stage of FITS evolution I find myself questioning the
creation of any new conventional axis notions for PHDU and IMAGE data
parallelepipeds.  Unless there is almost uniform agreement on the
utility of such things it seems to me that it may be better to move
such data into BINTABLE columns.  In that case each application can
engineer its own set of descriptions without entangling the whole of
the FITS community.  This may be a break with tradition for certain
types of data, but it seems to be used well by the high energy
community with their visualization and analysis tools.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
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