Draft note for the annotation of plate scans

[Mark Taylor]

Markus,

On Wed, 7 Sep 2022, Markus Demleitner wrote:

> There are several projects to scan glass plates and other
> observations from before the age of the CCD, and quite a few more
> have already been finished.  These projects by and large ad-libbed
> the FITS headers for their scans -- which includes me, for a few sets
> of scans I'm publishing.
> 
> That is why I was very happy when I saw a relatively principled
> approach to the problem of annotating scanned (direct-ish, meaning
> this isn't really suitable for scanned spectra) astronomical
> photographs by Taavi Tuvikene and colleagues in the context of the
> APPLAUSE project (ivo://www.plate-archive.org/tap).
> 
> In cooperation with the original authors, I have turned this proposal
> into a draft for an IVOA Note.  A rendered version of that draft is
> at <http://docs.g-vo.org/plateheaders.pdf>, and you can pull the
> source (PRs welcome!) from
> <https://github.com/msdemlei/plateheaders.git>.
> 
> So...
> 
> * I'm not even sure that the IVOA is the right forum for this kind
>   of thing, and much less which WG would look at it.  But then this is
>   about interoperability of astronomical data, and I wouldn't know of
>   a more appropriate forum.  So... does anyone feel I should better
>   go elsewhere with this?

I'd have thought the obvious place to look for this sort of thing
would be somewhere in the Conventions section of the NASA FITS
web site: https://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_conventions.html

Mark

--
Mark Taylor  Astronomical Programmer  Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bristol.ac.uk          http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/