Hi Roy,
I admire your chutzpah, but the more fundamental the concept, the more painful its standardization.
There's more than a bit of virtual surreality in discussing third millennium A.D. support for a third millennium B.C. data representation. For example, FITS may not have been codified by Hammurabi – it just feels that way. Implicit in the original 1981 Wells, et. al., paper was that angular values would be expressed in decimal degrees. This has long since been relaxed (see, for example, http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/pipermail/fitsbits/2000-November/ 000158.html) to allow sexagesimal strings for RA and DEC keywords. The point is not only that prior usage is hard to overcome – the point is that the entire focus on RA and DEC is a red herring, since the real issue is generalized WCS representations.
Similarly, that sexagesimal notation itself predates the code of Hammurabi (c. 1780 B.C.) by several centuries only begins to hint at the semantic inertia we're facing. The core conceit of 2880 byte FITS records is the same as the reason for using base sixty numbers – easy divisibility into round fractions. Minutes and seconds are often reported separately in the astronomical literature from hours or degrees because – well – that's the whole point. It is an aid for reading tabular listings, for comparing nearby locations on the sky, for simplifying approximations, and to permit reliable transmission of numbers that would otherwise require double precision floats.
It may also be required by a journal's typographic conventions. For instance, the RA and DEC values from the example FITS header in the 1981 paper are in decimal degrees, 122.5419617 and 66.5995040 – but these are written in the text as:

Maybe the real IVOA argument is with the University of Chicago.
The king cried aloud to bring in the astrologers, the Chaldeans, and the soothsayers. And the king spake, and said to the wise men of Babylon, Whosoever shall read this writing, and shew me the interpretation thereof, shall be clothed with scarlet, and have a chain of gold about his neck, and shall be the third ruler in the kingdom.
When Daniel read the writing on the wall, base sixty notation had already been in use for sixty generations.
Rob Received on 2006-09-17Z22:19:50