[Aavso-photometry] FITS Keyword standard

[arne]

Michael Newberry wrote:
> Jim,
> 
> I appreciate what you are saying, and it is unfortunate that you have to 
> make those extra steps. But that is not the fault of IRAF or MIRA. The 
> programs you mention that control your camera or telescope need to clean up 
> any non-standard issues so they use the correct keywords to start with. 
> There is no good served by having images that begin life with the wrong 
> header structure---only extra work and gotchas downstream, as you have 
> found. That's why there is *one* standard. You should pressure the software 
> vendor to adhere to it.
> 
Several people have asked me to work with the software vendors and
get them to standardize on a common set of keywords.  This has been
painfully obvious to me while processing the NGC6811 images that
came from several different vendors.  I agree with Michael that there
are certain standard keywords, and vendors are doing a good job of
implementing them.  It is just the optional keywords where some
vendors use them, some invent their own, some use a different format,
etc.  I know what I need for photometry, and I know what the professional
community uses, and it really suprises me that vendors have ignored
the efforts of many professional astronomers.

The standard data submission formats will be released about January 14.
I then will be spending the next week finishing the comparison star
database update, and then perhaps I can start a dialog on FITS with
the vendors.

By the way, Jim, IRAF *does* do camera control, and was the first
image processing package to do so to the best of my knowledge.
The package is called ICE (Instrument Control Environment) and was
terribly complex to program, but several sites still use it.
Arne