Subject: High Energy FITS Format Standards

From: [email-masked] (William Pence)
Date: Tue, 16 Mar 93 15:28:34 -0500

Lucio Chiappetti has asked what is the best forum for discussing data
format issues related to high energy astrophysics missions like ROSAT,
AstroD, AXAF, SAX, Spektrum-RG, XMM, XTE, etc.  The purpose of such
discussions would be to define  conventions for the use of FITS
standard formats to store similar types of high energy astrophysics
data. This would involve defining standard names for FITS keywords and
table columns and designing standard table column layouts for different
types of data, all within the current FITS standard.  Discussions of
expanding the FITS standard, e.g., to define new types of FITS
extensions, would be beyond the scope of this discussion group.

My own preference would be to have a separate mail exploder
specificly for discussion of High Energy Astrophysics data related
issues.  I think the WGAS and FITSBITS groups are both too broad in
nature for this purpose which would make it difficult to reach a
concensus.  It would be better to have a smaller and more focused group
to discuss these specific issues.  There would be no attempt to
limit membership to this discussion group, but I would expect
the core members to be the 1 or 2 people from each high energy astrophysics
mission that are most directly concerned with data format issues,
as well as the writers of general analysis software for this
type of data.

The HEASARC already maintains a mail distribution list like this
consisting of people interested in FITS data formats for the CGRO,
ROSAT, AstroD, and XTE missions.  These people are mainly located at
GSFC, but there are a few at other sites.  We would be happy to expand
the membership of this list to include anyone interested in these
issues.

-Bill Pence

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From: [email-masked] (Eric Mandel)
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 93 10:32:00 -0500

Bill (and others),

	We at SAO would be interested in participating in a HEA-FITS
mail exploder.  As is the case with GSFC, we have a few projects going
on here, each of which would probably want to participate.

	As it turns out, we have recently brought up Brent Chapman's
public domain "Majordomo" mailing list manager, which allows people to
subscribe and unsubscribe to mailing lists without human intervention.
It appears to work very nicely.  It might be a good idea to use this
software to manage the HEA-FITS list, rather than have a human perform
this function.

	If there is general consensus to start a HEA-FITS list, we can
easily add such a list to the ones that majordomo manages here, if
this is acceptable.

Regards,

Eric Mandel

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From: [email-masked] (Nick White, HEASARC. Tel: 301 286 8443)
Date: Wed, 17 Mar 93 10:50:32 -0500

Eric,

We have the same "smart" exploder software, and will setup an heafits
exploder over the next day or two.

Nick