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Supported HDS Data Types

ESP applications can process NDFs stored in any of the following HDS data types. The correspondence between Fortran types and HDS data types is as follows:

 
Figure 6: A poorly flatfielded source image and the output generated by SKEW.
HDS Type Number of bytes VAX FORTRAN Type
_DOUBLE 8 DOUBLE PRECISION
_INTEGER 4 INTEGER
_REAL 8 REAL
_UBYTE 1 BYTE
_BYTE 1 BYTE
_UWORD 2 INTEGER*2
_WORD 2 INTEGER*2

(_UBYTE) and (_UWORD) types are unsigned and so permit data ranges of 0-255 and 0-65535 respectively.

Those applications that output NDF files propagate images containing only a DATA component stored using the _REAL (8 byte) data type. Other information (such as variance) is not propagated to reduce the storage space required and because these other components are not used by any of the ESP applications.

In most of the ESP applications all processing is carried out using REAL values. However, ELLFOU, ELLPRO, HISTPEAK, HSUB and LOBACK all occasionally employ double precision variables when that increased degree of accuracy is required.



next up previous
Next: Position angle convention
Up: ESP Extended Surface Photometry
Previous: Detailed description of ARD files

ESP --- Extended Surface Photometry
Starlink User Note 180
Norman Gray
Mark Taylor
Grant Privett
27 January 2000
E-mail:ussc@star.rl.ac.uk

Copyright © 2002 Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils