Previous Article
Next Article
Table of Contents

Report of the IRAF Users Committee - 8 March 1995 (1Jun95)
(from CCS, NOAO Newsletter No. 42, June 1995)

The IRAF Users Committee meeting was held on Friday, 13 January 1995, at
NOAO. This year we welcomed four new members to the committee, whose
membership is as follows:

Belinda Wilkes (CfA) - Chair            1991-94
        belinda@cfa.harvard.edu
Jeff Pier (US Naval Obs.)               1993-95
        jrp@nofs.navy.mil
Peter Eisenhardt (JPL)                  1993-95
        prme@kromos.jpl.nasa.gov
Tim Carone (EUVE)                       1994-95
        tcarone@ssl.berkeley.edu
Bill Romanishin (Oklahoma)              1994-96
        romanishin@phyast.nhn.uoknor.edu
Bill Sparks (STScI)                     1994-96
        sparks@stsci.edu
Steve Walton (California State)         1994-96
        swalton@csun.edu

The committee thanks all the members of the IRAF group and other support
personnel for the time and effort involved in preparing for and attending the
meeting. A special vote of thanks goes to George Jacoby for the excellent
overall organization.

                              General Remarks

As always, we were impressed by the size of the IRAF user community which
has once again increased over the past year, especially internationally. There
are now more than 1200 known sites worldwide covering 24 countries on all 7
continents, as well as secondary distribution sites in India and Japan. FTP
usage has roughly doubled since last year with an average of 320 files being
transferred daily. E-mail traffic has also increased, but with no noticeable
decrease in the quality or promptness of the IRAF team's responses.

Given the importance of IRAF to a large community of astronomers
throughout the world, we are gratified by the official acknowledgement it has
received at executive levels in the community during recent years. For
example, the Bahcall Report states: "The observational astronomy community
has shown an admirable degree of coherence by developing systems like AIPS
and IRAF, which have been adopted widely. These packages have saved an
immense amount of time and duplicated effort." NOAO and the IRAF group
should feel justly proud of their achievements to date.

We are also pleased to see that many of the concerns included in last year's
report have now been addressed, in particular: the release of IRAF 2.10.3 with
xgterm and imtool capabilities, the Beginner's Guide, and a number of
cookbooks and tutorials.

                               Site Support

We continue to be impressed at the quality of user support provided by the
IRAF group. They have managed to continue this high quality, despite the
increase in demand, through development of standard answers to "frequently
asked questions," newsgroups (such as the various ADASS groups: write to
news@iraf.noao.edu), local support people, and the increase in beginners
documentation mentioned above.

However we are concerned that this load will continue to increase beyond the
capacity of the current IRAF group. In particular, the release of PC-IRAF may
result in a disproportionate increase in user questions since a new population
of users will be coming on line. We strongly support the IRAF group's plan
NOT to provide support for PC hardware or non-research questions.

                              World Wide Web

We strongly encourage the IRAF group to take fullest advantage of the
WWW. It is being used increasingly as people discover it and is a very
efficient and user-friendly way to distribute information. Checking the IRAF
home page, we find that progress has already been made in this area since the
meeting in January. The help page availability and search capability is very
good, although sometimes slow presumably due to network traffic. We
recommend that documents and cookbooks also be made available this way.
IRAF also has the advantage, since it is distributed software, that html
versions of documents and help files can be distributed with the software for
local use so that users can avoid the often slow networks. We urge that this
be done for all documentation available in the next release.

                              Documentation

We recommend that more global help be available from inside of IRAF.
Particular topics which immediately come to mind are:

wcs             the world coordinate system,

keywords        a list and description of all IRAF standard header keywords
                and the tasks which use them,

calibration     for example where are the standard stars stored, which ones
data            are available, what are the references, and so on,

package         general help on packages such as ccdproc and onedspec.

We would also like to see more documentation of the actual algorithms used in
the software. In an html version of a help file, this could be at a deeper level
so that only users who require such detailed knowledge need to access it.

                               Science Tasks

We were disappointed that none of the science priorities listed in last year's
report have been addressed and that the long-term priorities presented at the
meeting did not include specific science tasks. However we understand that
emphasis this past year has been at the system level with the 2.10.3 release
and the development of GUIs. We recommend that the following topics be
considered as high priority for development once 2.11 is released (listed in no
particular priority order):

        IR package
        Astrometry package
        Cosmic ray
        Surface photometry (requires assessment of stsdas capabilities)
        CCD reduction for mosaics,
        Error propagation
        List of changes to task parameters provided with releases
        General solar astronomy tasks

                            General Priorities

We support the short-term priorities as presented at the meeting, namely:

PC-IRAF         port to Linux first
2.11 release    preferably by spring 1995
GUI release     preferably by fall 1995

On the longer term, Open IRAF should be the priority as this represents the
"next generation" of software.

                                  Gemini

Given the large IRAF user community and the amount of time individual
astronomers already have invested in IRAF, we strongly urge that IRAF be
part of the Gemini software system. Additional funding will be required in
order to allow IRAF to expand in this direction. However, given its vast
existing infrastructure and user base, it would appear to be a cost effective
route to take. This is particularly true for the users of the Gemini telescopes,
whether at the telescope or remote, who will not then need to spend a large
amount of time in learning new (to them) or untried system(s).

                                   IUC

The committee would like to increase its visibility in and usefulness to the
community. Membership should be publicized in the NOAO and IRAF
Newsletters and from the IRAF home page before the annual meeting,
allowing users sufficient time to contact a committee member with issues to be
raised.

In order to keep in touch with IRAF progress during the year, the committee
would like to obtain informal quarterly updates from George Jacoby, including
progress on items discussed at the IUC meeting and any new items that have
surfaced in the interim.

The committee would also like to expand its role and, hopefully, its usefulness
to the IRAF group itself. IUC members consider themselves as representative
users and provide feedback to the IRAF group on new (and old) items, such as
"The Beginner's Guide." In particular the import/export facility presented by
Mike Fitzpatrick represents a major step forward in terms of the path of data
from the telescope to the journal. Timely testing of this and other new
capabilities by the IUC members as they become available could potentially be
very useful to the IRAF development group. Several IUC members also
expressed an interest in active involvement in science (and other) planning in
their particular area of expertise. There also needs to be a mechanism for
addressing "pet peeves" that are too detailed for discussion at the IUC meeting.
The committee will work with George Jacoby to develop a plan for such
involvement.

                                  Management

The IUC commends George Jacoby highly for his efforts over the past 18
months as IRAF Project Scientist. The project has moved forward significantly
during this time both in terms of its own development and its position in and
acceptance by the astronomical community. Communication has improved
markedly and the project is more focussed and directed.

The IUC requests, once again, the presentation at the meeting of a
management plan covering at least one year ahead. Without such a plan, it is
very hard for the IUC to offer practical advice on priorities since little or no
information on the relative personpower load of each task is presented. We
urge George Jacoby and Doug Tody to work together in drawing up such a
plan for presentation at the next IUC meeting.

                                    Funding

Given the increasing demand for IRAF and for support of its users, it is
imperative that the funding level for the IRAF group should at the least remain
level and preferably be increased. Given the current budgetary crisis facing
NOAO, we recommend that alternate sources of funding be investigated. In
particular, large projects (e.g., AXAF, STScI) which are committed to IRAF
should be asked for support in terms of funds or personpower when their
requirements place additional demands upon the IRAF group.

The IRAF Users Committee

Previous Article
Next Article
Table of Contents