FITS is an interchange/archive format for astronomical images, with an elaborate header that tells you everything you need to know about how to interpet the data block. The idea is that millenia from now, as long as people remember how to read ASCII, they'll be able to read these files. The standard format is pretty wasteful of space, so you end up with dekamegabyte files. Hubble FITS files are huge, requiring tens of MB to represent a 1024x1024 image (each pixel is a double floating point number representing raw DN counts from the detectors, so it's 8 bytes/pixel). All that standardization means that I can write a FITS-reading input subsystem to translate FITS into FirstLight's internal data formats, and thus read all astronomical images, Hubble and Keck and everybody else's.

I blasted through the description of wavelength-remapping way too fast. The more long-winded description is this: The idea is to take images acquired through filters at wavelengths the human eye can't see, and mathematically reassign them to visible wavelengths, for the purposes of processing to produce color. The scenario I was envisioning with Hubble was to take the 8-12 images that make up a particular session, shot through filters ranging from far ultraviolet to far infrared, and scale their wavelengths to fit within the (anthropocentric) visible-light spectrum. It's important to note that the assignments aren't arbitrary, but rather they're based on applying a constant scaling factor so that the relationships between channels, and their consequent contribution to color, is preserved. It's not technically "true color" because of the limitations of the human eye, but it's a bit better than "false color", IMHO. It's a sort of "virtual true color".

This is another one of those situations, like processing color from Mars, where the result has perhaps less scientific validity in a strict technical sense, but it's capable of communicating a better understanding to a lay audience. Geologists and astronomers both have a specific agenda looking at multispectral images based on the deep meaning of reflection or emission at given wavelengths; us amateurs and civilians just want to "see as much as we can". It should produce "pretty pictures".

I can see, in a general intuitive way, why AO would initially work better at longer wavelengths, and why it's inevitable that refinement of the technique would make it effective at shorter and shorter wavelengths. I expect you guys to deliver the goods in due time.