Subject: FITS on PClones: 1) display? 2) exabyte?

From: [email-masked] (Stephen Walton)
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 92 12:21:06 -0400

I have two related questions about FITS file on PClones, one general
and one specific.

The general one is:  what software is out there for displaying them,
esp. on a Super VGA in 256-color mode?  Ideally, I'd like to find
someone who's written a driver for PCVISTA, but I'd settle for a
simple stand-alone program to do the trick.

The specific one is:  we now have an Exabyte 8200 attached to a
SCSI Host Adaptor in one of our clones.  Is there free software
available which would allow us to read and write FITS files to
this in a standard format?  What do you all consider "standard",
anyway?  I have a lead on two packages, both from NovaStor Corp.
NovaTAR will, as its name implies, read and write Unix tar
format Exabyte tapes.  TPU will allow labeled or unlabeled dumps
of files to tape.  My impression is that to allow full streaming
mode, people are writing Exabyte FITS files blocked 28800 bytes
to the tape record;  is this accurate?  When you reread them
from tape, do you strip off trailing nulls to get the disk file
back to the original size?

Thanks in advance for any information.

Steve Walton, San Fernando Observatory, Cal State Northridge
[email-masked]