Okay, that's not helping me right now but that's nice that your able to get that off your chest.

You can probably tell I've been mentally composing an answer to the people who've written me about FirstLight. I wish I had the time and resources to finish the damn thing by now, but that's not how the world's working these days.

I must say I do not like the idea of loading Bitmaps up stream on dial up :-(

Let me clarify that part for you: The site would get the raw data itself, either from a local cache (the most-recent gigabyte or so), or by FTPing from one of the official sites, and work on the data in the server. You'd preview small JPEGs while you work. When you're satisfied, you can download the full-size finished images in a lossless compression format like PNG. You'd actually burn less bandwidth doing it this way, compared to downloading uncompressed IMG files; and it'd be roughly a push compared to downloading IMQ, without the decompression hassles.

Did I say secrecy? no I don't think I said secrecy.

I could set it up to optionally use encryption, I guess (and charge a premium because of the overhead involved in encrypting huge amounts of data), but in good conscience I'd have to advise against paying for it. Somebody'd have to actually tap your phone line to see what you're up to, and realistically, what're the odds?

I've only taken a superficial look at the THEMIS file format, enough to see that I've underestimated the work involved. The two things that are daunting are, first, decoding that multi-image cube format; and second, coming up with an algorithm to map tiles along an angle. I shouldn't have assumed that just because MSSS built the visible camera, it'd produce images exactly like MOC.

--Robert