Re:NASA Data Portal
by LeoPanthera on Thursday August 18, 2016 @10:34PM
(#12317627)
I used to work in IT at a place where FITS was the standard image format. Made me want to tear my hair out daily.
ImageMagick supports FITS, and will happily convert it to PNG or some other rational format. (It will make FITS files too, if you're feeling masochistic.)
Problem is that you need to have the actual photon counts. NASA (for Kepler at least) uses FITS files to store essentially a 2d array of photon counts. So converting to another format is not actually helpful.
But I agree that if someone is using it as an _image_ format they should reconsider their life decisions.
Re:NASA Data Portal
by LeoPanthera on Friday August 19, 2016 @01:06PM
(#12321532)
Sure, but for generating a quick thumbnail, it works just fine.
I'm trying to remember the format of the LRO LOLA data... I never quite managed to put the tiles together right without seams everywhere.
Too much container complexity for what it is...
Re:NASA Data Portal
by GFK_of_xmaspast on Thursday August 18, 2016 @10:41PM
(#12317649)
It looks like there's plenty of libraries out there that can deal with FITS files without bringing the whole thing into core.
Haha, don't get me started on FITS files. It's essentially impossible to analyse big postage stamps because you need to load the entire FITS file (and array) into memory. It's annoying that this is the standard we use.
> http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR - a huge collection of catalogues of stars, galaxies and other things that can be searched and browsed.
SIMBAD (also from that site) is incredible for cross-referencing and finding references for indexed bodies. I used it quite a lot while I was doing astro research.