"Doug Mink" wrote in message
rao.edu...
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.

Thank you Steve, Doug and Patrick.