Message about viewing FITS over the WWW.
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Additional note: one needs NCSA Mosaic version 2.4 or
greater to be able to take advantage of this trick.
Netscape knows all about it.

Message 320:
From mongo Thu Aug 11 09:44:09 1994
Subject: Teaching NCSA Mosaic to view FITS images
(16 lines) More? [ynq] 


NCSA Mosaic can be taught to view datatypes other than those commonly sent over
the WWW.  In particular, it can be taught how to view FITS images.  The
procedures and protocols are described in
    http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/Software/Mosaic/Docs/d2-multimedia.html
and they use the standard Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)
mechanisms.  (The same mechanisms could be used to email and view FITS
images from inside a MIME-capable mail reader such as elm.)

First, create a .mime.types file in your home directory containing
    image/x-fits    fits
Then, create a .mailcap file in your home directory containing
    image/x-fits;           saoimage %s

The next time you start Mosaic it will know what to do with a FITS image
found anywhere on the Internet.  This trick cannot be performed with IRAF
image format because the data are not all stored in a single file.
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Message 321:
From mongo Mon Aug 15 14:12:29 1994
Subject: presenting your research on the World Wide Web
(21 lines) More? [ynq] 


The people who consume and fund astronomical research are increasingly online.

Both the US Senate and the House are now officially online.  They are providing
gopher servers (gopher://gopher.senate.gov and gopher://gopher.house.gov) which
serve full text WAIS databases of bills in progress and provide much other
electronically accessible government information.  And they are reading it, too.

Many school districts around the country are online, and students from
kindergarten upwards are using Gopher and Mosaic to gather information.
Commercial online providers are beginning to provide such access to their
growing numbers of subscribers.                     

Being able to provide an attractive, informative *electronically* *accessible*
version of completed and in-progress research may be a useful survival skill.

UCO/Lick does not yet have a HTTP server, but until that time we can serve
*a limited amount* of Mosaic-readable HTML documents via anonymous FTP.
It is possible to construct test hierarchies of HTML and see them locally by
using URLs like file:/home/YourMachine/YourName/YourWwwStuff.  When such
hierarchies are ready for presentation to the outside world, you can ask
webmaster@lick for a space and then move them to the anonymous FTP server.
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