Just had an exchange of messages with Nigel Hambly and Mike Read
(Edinburgh SuperCOSMOS chaps) that boils down to the following:
> Do you know if GAIA can display images that are stored as RICE
> compressed binary extensions.
>
> For WFCAM data the images from the 4 detectors are being stored in this
> way (primary header plus 4 RICE compressed binary table extensions).
>
> An example is at http://surveys.roe.ac.uk/wsa/wfcam.fits
So it seems that WFCAM data will be released in this new format that I'd
never heard of. It turns out that this RICE compression scheme is
supported by CFITSIO, which is good, so it should be possible to convert
CONVERT to handle it (at present the "imcopy" command in CFITSIO allows
you to re-process the example file above into a standard FITS MEF file
with image extensions). Although I'm not sure how the interface would work
(to select a binary table extension that becomes a single image).
Converting GAIA to handle these files is more problematic, as it doesn't
use CFITSIO in the same way as us (Skycat has a hacked older version of
CFITSIO), plus it already knows too much about FITS binary tables (so it
will require work to do the right thing when GAIA sees such a file).
Clearly this is work we'll not be able to avoid.
Cheers,
Peter.
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