Alternative Astronomical FITS imaging
This addresses a data preservation issue for astronomers who rely on external sources like NED, but it is an incremental improvement in data handling.
The paper tackles the problem of losing metadata when extracting astronomical radio maps from AIPS by proposing a method to embed this information directly into the image, preserving it even during format conversions to lossless formats.
Astronomical radio maps are presented mainly in FITS format. Astronomical Image Processing Software (AIPS) uses a set of tables attached to the output map to include all sorts of information concerning the production of the image. However this information together with information on the flux and noise of the map is lost as soon as the image of the radio source in fits or other format is extracted from AIPS. This information would have been valuable to another astronomer who just uses NED, for example, to download the map. In the current work, we show a method of data hiding inside the radio map, which can be preserved under transformations, even for example while the format of the map is changed from fits to other lossless available image formats.