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A comment on NASA Data Portal. Parent comment

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.)

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Re:NASA Data Portal by cyphar on Friday August 19, 2016 @05:45AM (#12318922)
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.

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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.
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