Subject: Re: DATE-OBS='31/12/99'

From: Lucio Chiappetti <lucio at ifctr.mi.cnr.it>
Date: Fri, 28 Jun 1996 09:35:16 +0200 (MET DST)

On Thu, 27 Jun 1996, Mike Corcoran wrote:

> A better approach in this spirit would be to explicitly define the year in a
> totally new keyword (YEAR-OBS or some such).  I.e.
> 
> 	YEAR-OBS='1996            '  / year corresponding to DATE-OBS
> 
> Absence of YEAR-OBS would imply the 20th century.  This is similar to Peter
> Bunclark's CENT-OBS but without the ambiguity of whether 20 means yr+2000 or
> 20th century.

  Could one instead not assume that 2-digit dates refer to the year
  interval from 1979 to 2079 (since FITS was invented on 28 march 79 as
  Don Wells reminds us every year), or perhaps from 1970 to 2070 (to
  match with the fact that "Unix internal time" is kept in seconds since
  1970 [by the way THAT 32-bit counter will also recycle sometimes] ?

  Surely the amount of FITS data pre-dating 197x will be limited ...
  [archival researchers don't shoot me]

  This will give us some more time ...

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