This is to announce the start of the 30-day Public Comment Period on
the FITS Region File convention which has been submitted for inclusion
in the Registry of FITS Conventions. This is the 12th in a growing
series of conventions submitted to the Registry which is maintained by
the IAU FITS Working Group.

Detailed information about 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

A FITS Region file is a FITS binary table that defines a spatial region
of a 2-dimensional image. The region file is often used to define an
area that is to be included or excluded from certain data processing
operations on the image. The region is specified as the union or
intersection of geometric shapes, such as 'circle' or 'rectangle'. The
REGION table is the FITS equivalent of the ASCII text region file that
has long been used by the ds9 image processing program and its
predecessor, SAOimage.

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 authors of the convention.

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