[AstroPy] Support for OIFITS, reconstructed images

[Brian Kloppenborg]

Hi Perry,

On 04/04/2013 01:59 PM, Perry Greenfield wrote:
> Before that can be answered well, it needs to be outlined what such
> support of this convention entails (to be clear, it's not an IAU
> standard, but only a registered convention as far I see from the link
> you provided). 
Indeed, although developed under the auspice of IAU working group 54 it
is just a registered FITS convention:
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/registry/oifits.html
> Presumably the astropy.io.fits can read these files already, so I'm
> guessing you want a more convenient object returned than the usual
> FITS structures (there isn't any new kind of extension, is there?). If
> that's the case, the people who use these objects should be the ones
> to design them. Are you asking us to implement this, or are you asking
> how to add your code to astropy? (You can infer that I'd prefer the
> latter; most of the existing contributors have higher priorities for
> development.). 
Indeed, astropy.io.fits can read and write these files already, I would
like to see a more convenient interface to OIFITS files merged into the
AstroPy library. This is something that I would do, rather than asking
other developers. The process by which this is done (which you explain
below) is what I was after.

> I'd say that coming up with working code in Python that does this is
> the first step, and to make that code compatible with the astropy
> guidelines for coding style, dependencies, tests, and documentation.
> Eventually this would result in a pull request to have it merged into
> the astropy core if it seemed to have good support in the relevant
> community. If you have questions about the best way to do the
> implementation, I think the astropy-dev mailing list is a good place
> to start.
Thanks. I'll check out these documents and get coding. I'll take the
SWIG/Clang question to them as well.

Cheers,
Brian