Re:Fastest star ever seen is moving at 8% the speed of light
by Keysh on Monday August 17, 2020 @01:26PM
(#24189423)
No one in astronomy uses TIFFs. Most scientific images are stored in FITS format, either in integer form for some raw data or in floating-point form.
Re:Fastest star ever seen is moving at 8% the speed of light
by rleigh on Wednesday August 19, 2020 @05:13PM
(#24216588)
FITS is very domain-specific for astronomy. It's not at all common in the wider scientific community.
I used to work on on of the larger imaging tools, supporting over 150 scientific file formats. The vast majority, over 80%, were using TIFF as a container. The next most popular was HDF5. FITS was not something I saw commonly, and we were getting images from researchers all over the world.
12- or 16-bit greyscale is common, with multiple channels for hyperspectral data. But since it can also store 32-bit data, floats, and complex numbers as well as rationals, it can be used as a container for pretty much anything you want to throw at it.
Regarding RAW. It's often used with colour CCDs with various types of CFA, like Bayer or CMY. It might have a higher bit depth, but it's still basically RGB but spatially separated and stored as greyscale. You could maybe feed it directly to your ML, but it's more common to filter it to create RGB data retaining the bit depth but at the expense of low pass filtering to remove aliasing artefacts. Or keep the separation to keep the high frequency components; really depends upon what information you want to extract.