This is to announce the start of the Public Comment Period on the "Foreign
File Encapsulation" FITS convention that has been submitted by the IRAF
group at NOAO for inclusion in the "Registry of FITS Conventions" that is
maintained by the IAU FITS Working Group.

A document describing this convention, and a sample FITS file that uses
it, are available for public review and comment from the FITS registry web
page at

http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_registry.html

This convention defines a new FITS extension type with

XTENSION= 'FOREIGN '

as a means of putting a FITS format wrapper about an arbitrary file. This
convention enables a file or tree of files to be wrapped up in a FITS file
and later restored in the original form to disk. A set of optional
keywords are defined to store information about the encapsulated file. An
example of the full set of header keywords is shown below:

XTENSION= 'FOREIGN ' / NOAO xtension type
BITPIX = 8 / Bits per pixel (byte)
NAXIS = 0 / No Image matrix
PCOUNT = 10756 / File size in bytes
GCOUNT = 1 / One group
EXTNAME = 'kp-B-pgr_120.png' / Filename
EXTVER = 1
EXTLEVEL= 1 / Directory level
FG_GROUP= 'kp-ftrB-dps-mdppgr' / Group Name
FG_FNAME= 'kp-B-pgr_120.png' / Filename
FG_FTYPE= 'binary ' / File type
FG_LEVEL= 1 / Directory level
FG_FSIZE= 10756 / Data size (bytes)
FG_FMODE= '-rw-r--r--' / File mode
FG_FUOWN= 'smith ' / File UID
FG_FUGRP= 'jones ' / File GID
FG_CTIME= '2006-06-15T02:32:49' / file ctime (GMT)
FG_MTIME= '2006-06-15T02:32:49' / file mtime (GMT)
END

This Public Comment Period will remain open for 30 days. Comments may be
posted here on the FITSBITS mail exploder or the sci.astro.fits newsgroup.
Minor typographical issues may be sent directly to the submitters of the
convention.

Bill Pence
(on behalf of the IAU FITS Working Group)
--
__________________________________________________ __________________
Dr. William Pence
NASA/GSFC Code 662 HEASARC +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771 +1-301-286-1684 (fax)