HST rules, as usual

The most attentive of readers would know that Price-Whelan and I have been working on assessing the bandwidth necessary for transmitting astronomical image information. That is, we have determined the precision to which you have to record pixel values to preserve all the scientific information in an image, where we assess that information for both bright sources and faint sources below the noise. Today we pulled down a RAW (unprocessed) HST ACS image from the HST Archive and showed that, in fact, the ACS raw data are telemetered within one bit of the minimum bandwidth. That is, of the 16 bits in the integer representation of raw ACS pixel data, at most one bit is wasted. That's pretty close to optimal, and we will say so in the paper we hope to submit within a week or two.