FAIRsharing record for: Flexible Image Transport System

This FAIRsharing record describes: This standard defines a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of scientific and other images in astronomy. Unlike many image formats, FITS is designed specifically for scientific data and hence includes many provisions for describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata. A major feature of the FITS format is that image metadata is stored in a human-readable ASCII header, so that an interested user can examine the headers to investigate an archived file of unknown provenance.