WFC: Year-2000 issue

[teuben at astro.umd.edu]

Dear WFC members,

  As most of you have been aware, with the help of Don Wells (chair of
the IAU FWG) and Bob Hanisch (chair of the WGAS) I have been making some
adjustments to the membership list of the WFC, since it was badly out of
date. People had been moving in and out of relevant projects etc. I want
to welcome all new members, and thank them for willing to help sort out
FITS matters which may plague us for the rest of our lives.

There is an urgent matter which we need to settle rather sooner than
later:

			"that Year-2000 issue"


In a posting on June 24, 1996 to sci.astro.fits Peter Bunclark
(psb at ast.cam.ac.uk) started a discussion on the "Year-2000" issue 
regarding the DATE-OBS keyword, which eventually resulted in a proposal
by the European FITS committee. See also the thread starting on

	http://www.astro.umd.edu/~teuben/fits/saf1996/0143.html

(this is still an experimental archive) for the full discussion.

The text of the European proposal, including a recent clarification, is
appended to the bottom of this email.

The American and Japanese regional FITS committees need to vote on this
matter soon. I would also argue you or your group(s) to think about
implementing the proposal, if you have not done that yet. This is often
the best way to find the flaws.

A reminder : the Year-2000 is going to be an agenda item at IAU comm. 5
meeting this summer in Japan, the next IAU GA is going to be in the year
2000 itself. The proposal is that the is year-2000 become 

I urge anybody to vent their opinions on this email exploder, or
privately. Personally I like the proposal. It does violate the rule that
only the first 8 characters of a string be relevant to interpreting the
data, but we should be able to live with that rather old-fashioned rule.

The plan is to set a date for a final vote in about a month, towards the
end of April.


--   Peter Teuben, chair of WGAS FITS Committee





<<<<

   "The European FITS Committee endorses the proposal for
    'Precise re-definition of DATE-OBS Keyword' as described
    in the 'sci.astro.fits' News Groups posting:

      'DATE-OBS and the millennium;   the proposal.' of
      1996-11-19T16:56:22+0000 by Peter Bunclark, RGO
      (Article: 1541 of sci.astro.fits)

     with the following comments:

     The European FITS Committee suggests

       1) that the use of UTC time scale is made mandatory for all
          DATExxxx keywords including DATE-OBS both for date and
          date/time representations (i.e. 'ccyy-mm-dd' and
          'ccyy-mm-ddThh:mm:ss[.sss...]Z' formats),

       2) that the Appendix should not be a part of the proposal
          but only appended for information.

    It is recommended that the proposal is forwarded to the
    IAU FITS Working Group for final approval. It is recognized
    that minor technical changes and clarifications may be
    implemented in this process.

    This endorsement will first be effective when the North
    American FITS Group within the AAS WGAS and the Japanese
    FITS Group adopt similar resolution in support of this
    proposal."

>>>>