During the annual (5th) ADASS, held last week in Tuscon, AZ, a FITS 
BoF (Birds of Feathers) was organized by Don Wells and Peter Teuben.

I am submitting this initial short report about the meeting, if anybody
wants to know more, or react to what has been said here, feel free to
follow up the discussion in sci.astro.fits. 

1) By using the titles at the conferences, the following papers/posters 
   were dealing with FITS directly:
    (see also http://noao.*.edu/...
   for more info on ADASS-V)

    Oral (Tuesday, 17:00) Don Jennings:
        FITS and HDF Data Format Interconvertablity

    Poster: Nelson Zarate:
        A FITS Image Extension Image Kernel for IRAF

    Poster: Dan Klinglesmith:
        Availability of Copernicus UV Data in FITS Format

    Poster: Arnold H. Rots:
        The XTE FITS Database

    Poster: Philip E Hodge: 
        STSDAS Tables Package Uses FITSIO

    Poster: Clive G. Page: 
        IDA -- A FITS table browser and editor

    Poster: William Pence:
        A Versatile New FITS File Viewer and Editor
        (this poster was minimalistic, next years ADASS will probably
         show this product in full bloom)


2) News items

* NOST standard has been approved by NASA, FITS committees to consider 
  it for formal approval, superceding the four A&A papers.

* BINTABLE paper just came out! (Cotton, W.D., Tody, D., and
  Pence, W.D. 1995. A&A Suppl, 113, 159.)

* Some software that we were aware of were released/updated:
  IDL: MRDFITS (Tom McGlynn, Goddard/CSC),  FX* (Bill Thompson, Goddard/ARC),
       READFITS and WRITEFITS
  FITSIO: V4.0 is now out. (Version 4.08 - 3-oct-95)
  FTOOLS: V3.3 is the current version, V3.4 has just officially been released
  Saoimage, SAOtng: support for WCS now in place (demo at the meeting)

* WWW: these should get you to almost anything you want to know about FITS

    http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/astro/fits/fits_home.html
        FITS support office; NASA/Hughes STX - Barry Schlesinger.

    http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/
        FITS archive at NRAO; NRAO - Don Wells.

    ftp://ftphost.hq.eso.org/fits
        ESO ftp server; ESO - Preben Grosbol.

    http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/ofwg/fits.html
        FITS resources within the HEASARC; NASA/HEASARC - Ian George.

* WCS
    * WCS paper revised again, now has an Appendix-A. Wide-field survey
      people should review this. The paper has recently been substantially
      changes, included a format change to A&A style macros.
      See the NRAO WWW
    * HEASARC proposal to adopt the celestial coordinate keywords as defined
      in Greisen \ Calabretta WCS paper (Pence) - see HEASARCH WWW

* MIME types
    Application to IANA for FITS MIME code(s) is planned, probably to be
        'image/fits', 'application/fits-table' and 'application/fits-image'.
    The IAU (i.e. Don Wells as the FITS IAU WG chair) should contact IANA
    for registration and procedures.

3) Individual contributions

Don Jennings
    FITS and HDF communications (w/ Bill Pence - see also their poster)
    FITS hierarchical grouping proposal - needed for FITS <-> HDF conversion

Immanuel Freedman
    FITS Data Compression: developments in Generic Data Compression, 
    These developments relate to work performed on the COBE
    project.
        Field-level COMPRESSIOn extensions.
        ROW or COLUMN pixel order.

Rob Seaman
    The Checksum proposal was presented and discussed.

Peter Teuben
    Proposal using FITS to interchange theoretical data (Nbody, SPH)
    Perhaps also related is ``fits_to_hdf''. Experiments with another
    group thinking about HDF archiving are underway.



Peter Teuben	teuben@astro.umd.edu
Don Wells	dwells@nrao.edu