Subject: Paper copies of version 0.3 NASA Draft FITS Standard

From: bschlesinger at nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov (Barry Schlesinger)
Date: 7 Jan 92 15:30:00 GMT

The paper edition of Version 0.3b of the NASA/OSSA Office of
Standards and Technology (NOST) Draft Standard for Implementation of
the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is now available from the
NOST Librarian.  As noted in the announcement of the ftp version, the
most significant changes between versions 0.2 and 0.3 are elimination
of the restriction on alphabetic characters to upper case in table
field names (value of TTYPEn keywords) and replacement of the
informational appendix describing the AIPS A3DTABLE construct with
text describing the Cotton and Tody BINTABLE binary tables proposal.    
	As noted in the announcement of electronic availability, the
Panel expects that only minor revisions, if any, will be necessary
before submission to the NOST Accreditation Panel for approval as a
NASA standard and to the IAU FITS Working group for endorsement as the
standard for FITS Consequently, no further general community comment
period is envisioned, although comments may be sent to the address at
the end of this announcement or to the user FITS at the same nodes as
the Librarian. The purpose of making version 0.3 generally available
now is to allow those individuals or groups who may have been using
earlier drafts as a reference on FITS, in spite of their provisional
status, to replace their copies of the earlier draft with the improved
one. As before, the NOST Standard should not be considered to
supersede the existing FITS documentation. 

======================================================================
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