A Tiled-Table Convention for Compressing FITS Binary Tables

Understand

This document describes a convention for compressing FITS binary tables that is modeled after the FITS tiled-image compression method (White et al.

• 2009) that has been in use for about a decade.
• The input table is first optionally subdivided into tiles, each containing an equal number of rows, then every column of data within each tile is compressed and stored as a variable-length array of bytes in the output FITS binary table.
• All the header keywords from the input table are copied to the header of the output table and remain uncompressed for efficient access.