Subject: Announcement -- WCS BOF at ADASS'94

From: dwells at nrao.edu (Don Wells)
Date: Thu, 22 Sep 1994 21:31:00 GMT

Announcment:

		World Coordinate Systems [WCS] Session

			  to be held at the

			  ADASS'94 FITS BOF

		      19:00 Monday 26 September

There will be a FITS BOF [Birds-Of-a-Feather] session on Monday
evening at ADASS'94 (Omni Inner Harbor Hotel, Baltimore, Maryland).

The first item on the agenda will be World Coordinate Systems [WCS].
The WCS portion of the BOF will last no more than one hour, 
with at least half an hour reserved for other FITS topics.

The first speaker on WCS will be Eric Greisen, who will introduce the
subject by giving an overview of and answering questions about the
current draft proposal, which can be fetched from:

       ftp://fits.cv.nrao.edu/fits/documents/wcs/wcs.all.ps.Z

All astronomical computing people who are interested in the problem of
associating celestial coordinate information with astronomical digital
imagery should attend the first hour of this FITS BOF session.

The second WCS speaker will be Doug Tody, who will discuss the IRAF
WCS implementation, and will describe the AIPS<-->IRAF WCS
interoperability tests which he and Eric performed in August.

The remainder of the hour will be available for reports of other WCS
implementations, answering technical questions, etc. Anyone who would
like to give brief informal discussion of WCS matters should contact
me so that time can be reserved.

If there are people who will not be attending ADASS'94, but who wish
to contribute to this session, I will be pleased to receive Email from
them and will read or summarize their messages during the session.

			-=- Sample Imagery -=-

I have created a directory for samples of FITS files which have WCS
information in their headers:

	     ftp://fits.cv.nrao.edu/fits/sampledata/wcs/

The initial contents of this directory are:

     311040 Sep 22 16:44 m82opt.fits
      11726 Sep 22 16:52 m82opt.lst
     305280 Sep 22 16:45 m82rad.fits
       5553 Sep 22 16:54 m82rad.lst
     538560 Sep 22 16:44 ngc1316o.fits
       6891 Sep 22 16:56 ngc1316o.lst
     538560 Sep 22 16:44 ngc1316r.fits
       7538 Sep 22 16:57 ngc1316r.lst

The files in this directory use FITS syntactic and semantic
conventions which are upwardly compatible with those described in the
draft document ftp://fits.cv.nrao.edu/fits/documents/wcs/wcs.all.ps.Z.
The *.lst files are listings of the FITS headers. The pairs of radio
and optical imagery have been re-gridded so that they are suitable for
'blink' comparison. One pair uses the 'ARC' projection, the other uses
'SIN'. Both IRAF and AIPS can interpret the coordinate information in
these headers.

I will be delighted to receive additional examples of WCS usage.
--
  Donald C. Wells         Associate Scientist         dwells at nrao.edu
                    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/~dwells
  National Radio Astronomy Observatory                +1-804-296-0277
  520 Edgemont Road,   Charlottesville, Virginia       22903-2475 USA