UPDATE FROM MABULA
I have had a very rough 2 months unfortunately health wise. I was struck 3x in a row with bacterial infections. The second infection occurred  after a routine hospital checkup and I became very sick. I had to rest and take a lot of antibiotics. Once I was recovering and restarting work 1 month ago, I again became sick. The infection was not yet gone, so even more antibiotics and rest was needed. Needless to say, it took a lot of my energy and I needed a lot of rest.
Finally, the infection is really gone and my energy is coming back step-by-step now and I have started work again. I am terribly sorry to have kept you waiting for support. I will address all outstanding questions and e-mails step-by step and will be on the forum daily from today.
APP 2.0.0-beta47 will come soon as well, a lot of work was already completed before I became very ill, so the release is also nearly ready for you. Beta47 will be much faster actually. Many workflows will be more than 2x faster, mosaics can even be 10x faster than before because registration really received a major boost... all compared to beta46. Â Before I release it, I will make sure that everything is working properly and then I will release it.
There is currently an initiative to make better use of the TIFF format for astronomy.
The idea is to save a FITS header in a standard way into a TIFF file. This makes conversion between TIFF and FITS possible without loosing header information.
The FITS header is stored in the description tag of the TIFF file.
The specification is here:
http://www.hnsky.org/astro-tiff.htm
Benefits:
- The TIFF compression algorithm makes the files smaller
- The files are readable by almost any image viewer.
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The standard way is intended to be used for light, dark, flat and flat-darks. These files are normally written in large quantities and compression and viewability makes sense.
Already some application developers are working on support. See the list at end of the specification in above webpage. For APP the only requirement would be to read TIFF and decode the tag description containing the header information in a string and decode information like date, exposure, gain, sensor temperature.
The specification is not set up as a replacement of FITS. It just propose better of use of the existing TIFF file format.
Han
www.hnsky.org
