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The Registry of FITS Conventions

Maintained by the IAU FITS Working Group

See also the local FITS conventions , the registered extension names, and keyword dictionaries.

The Registry of FITS Conventions provides a central and authoritative repository for documenting conventions that have been developed by the FITS user community for storing and transmitting various types of information in FITS format data files. A FITS convention is defined as a set of related FITS header keywords, and optionally, other data structures within FITS tables, FITS images, or other types of conforming FITS extensions that are to be used for a specific purpose. The IAU FITS Working Group is responsible for the this Registry and for the rules and procedures for entering new conventions into it.

These conventions are not necessarily recommended by the IAU FITS Working Group for reuse in new applications. The registration process is mainly designed to ensure that the documentation about the existing FITS convention meets a minimum level of completeness and clarity. A separate and more rigorous review process is required before a FITS convention is endorsed by the IAUFWG and is approved as part of the FITS Standard.


Registered Conventions:

Conventions that have been reviewed and incorporated into the FITS Standard:

The following 6 conventions were reviewed by the IAU FITS Working Group in 2016 and have been officially incorporated into version 4.0 of the FITS Standard. The documentation about these conventions provided here may contains additional details than is given in the FITS Standard, but in case of any descrepancies, the specifications in the Standard shall supersede what is given here.

General Conventions:

World Coordinate Systems Conventions:

Conventions applicable to specific types of data:



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