Data Disk Format

[Tom Droege <tdroege@veriomail.com>]

Rob Creager has been having a problem reading the format on the Data 
Reduction Group disks.  It is clearly an Intel/first byte/last byte/signed 
integer problem.

Have any of the rest of you had this problem?  Image Scientist reads the 
file as they are intended to be seen, but DS9 does not.  I am not quite 
sure what DS9 does, but it appears to rescale them in some way.  Note that 
these files are the output of the RawToFits program, so DS9 is reading 
something in the fits header and doing the wrong thing.

I suspect that it is something trivial.  Since no one has complained 
before.  Further some of you seem to be getting the same result as 
I.  Possibly someone can tell me how to set up DS9 so that it reads our 
files as intended.

Note that the background for a dark frame (close to the pedestal that is 
set by the hardware) is around -25000 counts.  If you don't see close to 
this mean value for a dark frame, then you have this problem.  Particularly 
if you get a mean value of near +9000 instead of -25000

Tom Droege