FITS Documents

This directory contains a variety of documents related to FITS, organized in a directory tree:
  • standards -- FITS standards documents. The NASA version of the FITS standards is file fits_standard.ps. The latest version of the BINTABLE (Binary Table) proposal is bintable_aa.ps.
  • overviews -- The NASA FITS User's Guide is a comprehensive overview of almost every aspect of FITS. This archive also contains discussions of FITS Basics ( part-1 and part-2, i.e. FAQs), the early history of FITS (pre-FITS prototyping and the FITS 'birthday'), the TABLE extension as a self-describing format for relational databases, and summary statistics of the FITS user community.
  • proposals -- Drafts of proposed additions to the FITS standards which are currently being considered by the FITS committees.
  • committees -- Reports of activities of the European FITS Committee and the WGAS FITS Committee, plus Annual Reports of the Chair of the IAU FITS WG.
  • drafts -- Various drafts which might or might not become formal proposals for FITS standards. Also, certain project-specific or discipline-specific conventions. For example, document ogip_93_001 describes the NASA HEASARC OGIP conventions for using the FITS BINTABLE extension to interchange and archive high energy astrophysics data.
  • wcs -- World Coordinate Systems -- documents discussing the semantics of describing various projective geometries using FITS header syntax.


Don Wells (dwells@nrao.edu) last changed this page 12/18/2001 9:35:03 PM