Grinder wrote:

For astronomers, what are some of the more useful data-to-color
transformations? I'm having difficulty resolving
domain-specific vocabulary, so I hope I'm not being
confusing -- it has certainly stymied my attempts to google
this information.

As one of those who just got back from ADASS in Strasbourg, I'll
add the ways which the venerable SAOimage program (which I maintain
at http://tdc-www.harvard.edu/software/saoimage/ ) converts from
FITS input data to 8-bit display pixels. It supports linear
(a linear scale from the minimum value at 0 and the maximum at 256),
square root, log, wrap (which produces a sort of contour image),
and histogram. The histogram can be clipped at the ends to emphasize
the middle values. All of the code is in C in the sclmap.c file
of the source code which is available through the page cited above.

-Doug Mink
Telescope Data Center
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
Cambridge, Massachusetts USA