[Aavso-photometry] FITS Keyword standard

[Jim Jones]

Arne

I'm impressed.  But if ICE is terribly complex as compared to IRAF 
itself (which is of course a piece of cake) I think I'll pass ;>}

My older ST7, uses EGAIN and EXPOSURE.  It also doesn't include 
RDNOISE.  I just checked my new ST8 and SBIG includes both EXPOSURE and 
EXPTIME, however it still uses EGAIN and doesn't include RDNOISE.  Since 
it appears that this is in the firmware of the camera, it may be an up 
hill battle to get it changed.  Probably the best you could hope for is 
to get both the legacy keyword and the correct keyword included in new 
cameras.

The camera mfgs may be a bigger problem than the software vendors.  
MaxIm and AIP (and to the best of my memory Canopus) simply realize that 
SBIG uses some nonstandard keywords and take care of the problem for the 
user.

It would also be nice to solve the MIDPOINT problem.  So far as I know, 
there is no official or unofficial standard for including the mid point 
of a stacked exposure.

Good luck.
Jim Jones

arne wrote:
> 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
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