Locally Developed FITS Conventions

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Local FITS Conventions
The following FITS conventions have been locally developed by various groups or projects. While it is believed that these conventions represent valid FITS usage and conform to the rules specified in the FITS Standard, they currently have no official endorsement by the IAU FITS Working Group. They are presented here for reference only. See the FITS Registry for a compilation of registered FITS conventions,

Table Indexing -a convention for creating indices on FITS tables (Postscript)
Conventions adopted by the HEASARC FITS Working Group:

RA and Dec keywords for giving the position of the observed object, the telescope pointing, and the spacecraft axes (text version)
The CATIDn FITS keywords to contain source catalog identifications (text version)
The CREATOR keyword to denote the name and version of the software program that generated that FITS file/extension (text version)
The HDUCLASn/HDUVERS keywords to provide a hierarchical classification scheme for the various types of FITS extensions (text version). Also available is a list of all HDUCLASn/HDUVERS values currently defined by the HFWG.
Quality flags with a value of zero should be reserved to indicate GOOD (not rejected) quality data. Non-zero quality flag values may be used to indicate varying degrees of 'badness'. (text version)
Keywords to define channel & energy boundaries (text version)
Keywords and definitions relating to exposure times (text version)
Standard strings to denote the mission, instrument and filters within X- and gamma-ray astronomy. This recommendation is contained in OGIP memo ogip_93_013 (postscript, latex).
TSORTKEY - a keyword for specifying the sort order of a FITS Table (text version)
Recommendations for naming columns in a FITS table (text, latex, postscript)

Image Compression: A 1991 proposal by Archibald Warnock, Robert Hill, Barbara Pfarr (all at GSFC), and D. Wells (NRAO) for storing compressed images in FITS format. See the FITSBITS email list archive of postings for September and October 1991 for a discussion of image compression in general and this proposal in particular. This compression proposal was never implemented, but some of the same ideas were used in the tiled image compression convention that is described in the FITS Registry of conventions.
MAST Data Format Guidelines - general FITS format guidelines for data files in the STScI multimission archive (MAST).
SDAC FITS Keyword Conventions - FITS conventions adopted at the Solar Data Analysis Center (SDAC) at Goddard Space Flight Center for several solar missions.
Chandra FITS File Designers Guide - details the FITS conventions adopted by the Chandra X-Ray Satellite project for its archival data sets. (40 pages, postscript file)
If you know of other items that should be listed on this page, please contact the FITS Support Office.

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Last revised: Monday, 25-Nov-2013 15:27:24 EST
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