This note describes a FITS header structure suitable for the annotation of scans of photographic plates containing sky images intended for scientific use. This metadata structure is general enough to cover several observational techniques common in the plate area, such as multiply exposed plates or objective prism spectroscopy. While this metadata structure was being developed together with annotation software (pyplates) and a specific digitisation project (applause), we hope it is general enough to serve as a lingua franca for the annotation of scans of historical photographic observations.

We plan to make stable versions of this document available through the IVOA document repository; we hope this will happen in 2023.

To build a PDF version this document, you will need a reasonably complete LaTeX installation, a sufficiently capable make, preferably latexmk and probably rsvg-convert. For further details, see ivoatexDoc.

This document is distributed under CC-BY-SA.