================================================================
 CCD Astrocamera format for MiPS: PIC
================================================================

 Preamble
----------
The early CCD cameras were for astronomy buffs with a lot of
money to spare, monochrome and quite small. However, they could
be used for exposures lasting several minutes and were thus
capable to gather the light from dim astro objects. Camera
manufacturers used their own proprietary bit map image format to
save the pictures, sometimes there was a diferent format for
each camera model.

The Microprocessor Imaging System is a software that came with
the Hi-SIS CCD astrocamera. Camera and software were, for the
time being, already sophisticated and processed files could be
saved in various existing formats like TIFF, BMP, GIF and FITS.

However, a new image file format with the extension "PIC" was
created as well. I could never get my hands on the specifcation,
I found out enough to read the file, however.


 The PIC format
----------------
The file consists of a variable length header followed by the
image data in words. The header is mostly obscure to me, the
following must suffice to read the data, I'm afraid.

Byte Position from Start of File (first Byte position = 0):

 2 &  3: Integer word pointing to first image data value from
         start of file.
68 & 69: Integer value containing image width.
70 & 71: Integer value containing image height.
72 & 73: Integer containing number of bits per pixel.

Read integers as Intel format representation, i.e. low order
byte is first.


 REFERENCES
------------


 Author
--------
hans-rudolf.wernli@bluewin.ch
http://mypage.bluewin.ch/horo/
05. August 2002