Inc. All Rights Reserved. In order to support HST operations and provide a service to the astronomical community, CASB has been digitizing the photographic Sky Survey plates from the Palomar and UK Schmidt telescopes. To provide convenient access to these data, the images have been compressed using a technique based on the H-transform to reduce the data volume. Although the technique is lossy, it is adaptive so that it preserves the signal very well. We typically compress the data by a factor of 7, but much higher compression ratios are possible.
Users can then easily retrieve image data for any part of the sky.