The following two sections (5.4 & 5.5) are concerned with the theory of mapping
a spherical image, or part thereof onto a plane, and how to integrate this work
with the
FITS specification. The large majority of this work has been carried out by
Calabretta and Greisen. The work started in circa 1992, with the most complete
form of the work to date being 3 papers written by these authors. However the
formalism laid down for integrating a WCS with
FITS has never been accepted by the
FITS committees and therefore the papers have never been published in any journals,
however they have been repeatedly presented at several conferences. The work is
widely accepted by the astronomical community at large and is the implementation
used by most observatories producing
FITS files with WCSs, including that used
by the ING WFS. The 3 papers are continually updated and are available at the
home pages of the authors, the most recent changes occurred in late 2001 with
several
FITS keywords being changed. This occurred well after the completion of
the
LT PL and so has not been integrated into the
PL. However the mapping and
projection theory stays the same. The versions of the papers used in the
PL, and
explained in this chapter, for the
FITS implementation work are
Calabretta and
Greisen (
2000);
Greisen (
2000);
Greisen and Calabretta (
2000), their location is specified in the
bibliography.