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Register a new userSignificant problems in FITS limit its use in modern astronomical research
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The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard has been a great boon to astronomy, allowing observatories, scientists and the public to exchange astronomical information easily. The FITS standard is, however, showing its age. Developed in the late 1970s the FITS authors made a number of implementation choices for the format that, while common at the time, are now seen to limit its utility with modern data. The authors of the FITS standard could not appreciate the challenges which we would be facing today in astronomical computing. Difficulties we now face include, but are not limited to, having to address the need to handle an expanded range of specialized data product types (data models), being more conducive to the networked exchange and storage of data, handling very large datasets and the need to capture significantly more complex metadata and data relationships. There are members of the community today who find some (or all) of these limitations unworkable, and have decided to move ahead with storing data in other formats. This reaction should be taken as a wakeup call to the FITS community to make changes in the FITS standard, or to see its usage fall. In this paper we detail some selected important problems which exist within the FITS standard today. It is not our intention to prescribe specific remedies to these issues; rather, we hope to call attention of the FITS and greater astronomical computing communities to these issues in the hopes that it will spur action to address them.
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The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard has been a great boon to astronomy, allowing observatories, scientists and the public to exchange astronomical information easily. The FITS standard, however, is showing its age. Developed in the late 1970s, the FITS authors made a number of implementation choices that, while common at the time, are now seen to limit its utility with modern data. The authors of the FITS standard could not anticipate the challenges which we are facing today in astronomical computing. Difficulties we now face include, but are not limited to, addressing the need to handle an expanded range of specialized data product types (data models), being more conducive to the networked exchange and storage of data, handling very large datasets, and capturing significantly more complex metadata and data relationships. There are members of the community today who find some or all of these limitations unworkable, and have decided to move ahead with storing data in other formats. If this fragmentation continues, we risk abandoning the advantages of broad interoperability, and ready archivability, that the FITS format provides for astronomy. In this paper we detail some selected important problems which exist within the FITS standard today. These problems may provide insight into deeper underlying issues which reside in the format and we provide a discussion of some lessons learned. It is not our intention here to prescribe specific remedies to these issues; rather, it is to call attention of the FITS and greater astronomical computing communities to these problems in the hope that it will spur action to address them.
In this paper we are exploring the possibilities of 3D printing in the fabrication of mirrors for astronomy. Taking the advantages of 3D printing to solve the existing problems caused by traditional manufacturing, two proof-of-concept mirror fabrication strategies are investigated in this paper. The First concept is a deformable mirror with embedded actuator supports system to minimise errors caused by the bonding interfaces during mirror assembly. The second concept is the adaption of the Stress Mirror Polishing (SMP) technique to a variety of mirror shapes by implemented a printed thickness distribution on the back side of the mirror. Design investigations and prototypes plans are presented for both studies.
We describe a compression method for floating-point astronomical images that gives compression ratios of 6 -- 10 while still preserving the scientifically important information in the image. The pixel values are first preprocessed by quantizing them into scaled integer intensity levels, which removes some of the uncompressible noise in the image. The integers are then losslessly compressed using the fast and efficient Rice algorithm and stored in a portable FITS format file. Quantizing an image more coarsely gives greater image compression, but it also increases the noise and degrades the precision of the photometric and astrometric measurements in the quantized image. Dithering the pixel values during the quantization process can greatly improve the precision of measurements in the images. This is especially important if the analysis algorithm relies on the mode or the median which would be similarly quantized if the pixel values are not dithered. We perform a series of experiments on both synthetic and real astronomical CCD images to quantitatively demonstrate that the magnitudes and positions of stars in the quantized images can be measured with the predicted amount of precision. In order to encourage wider use of these image compression methods, we have made available a pair of general-purpose image compression programs, called fpack and funpack, which can be used to compress any FITS format image.
Measuring scientific development is a difficult task. Different metrics have been put forward to evaluate scientific development; in this paper we explore a metric that uses the number of peer-reviewed, and when available non-peer-reviewed articles, research research articles as an indicator of development in the field of astronomy. We analyzed the available publication record, using the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Database System, by country affiliation in the time span between 1950 and 2011 for countries with a Gross National Income of less than 14,365 USD in 2010. This represents 149 countries. We propose that this metric identifies countries in `astronomy development with a culture of research publishing. We also propose that for a country to develop astronomy it should invest in outside expert visits, send their staff abroad to study and establish a culture of scientific publishing. Furthermore, we propose that this paper may be used as a baseline to measure the success of major international projects, such as the International Year of Astronomy 2009.
We report the outcomes of a survey that explores the current practices, needs and expectations of the astrophysics community, concerning four research aspects: open science practices, data access and management, data visualization, and data analysis. The survey, involving 329 professionals from several research institutions, pinpoints significant gaps in matters such as results reproducibility, availability of visual analytics tools and adoption of Machine Learning techniques for data analysis. This research is conducted in the context of the H2020 NEANIAS project.
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