On Thu, 28 Apr 2005, Brad Cavanagh wrote:
> WFCAM data won't be released in RICE-compressed FITS images. All data
> will be released as catalogues as obtained from CASU (or maybe WFAU, I
> keep forgetting who does what over there) via the WFCAM Science Archive,
> so PIs will only get a source catalogue from their observations. WFCAM
> data are just too large to be able to send a PI any sort of data files
> for their run -- in a typical night we get around 3000 observations, and
> at 16MB per observation per chip that's around 220GB of data per night.
>
> We send CASU RICE-compressed FITS images on tape that they use to
> generate the source catalogues. Their pipeline uses CFITSIO that can
> presumably handle these file.
>
> However (and there's always a however, sorry) there are some groups
> (University of Hawaii and Japanese observers, for two) that probably
> won't be going via the science archive to retrieve their results. UH
> might be getting disks of RICE-compressed FITS images that they'll
> reduce themselves (but annoyingly enough for them IRAF can't read these
> images either). I don't know what's happening with Japanese observers,
> and even the UH situation is fairly unknown as Paul Hirst (the WFCAM
> instrument scientist) was just given a USB disk by a UH PI to get his
> data -- we don't know if that's how UH is going to operate from now on.
>
> The WFCAM surveys and general PATT observing will use the science
> archive to get their scientific results and will never see an actual
> WFCAM data file.
Hi Brad,
thanks for this, it's good to see that the actual data will not be
floating around much. With this in mind I've cobbled some support into
GAIA so you can at least have a look and run a few tasks on images (this
basically boils down to decompressing the appropriate extension when it's
loaded from the HDU chooser dialog). Clearly we should probably also add
some changes to CONVERT:FITS2NDF, but none of this looks too pressing and
can just go on someones todo list.
Cheers,
Peter.
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