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IRAF Update (1Jun95) (from CCS, NOAO Newsletter No. 42, June 1995) A new version of IRAF, V2.10.4, has been prepared and should be in distribution by the time this Newsletter hits the streets. V2.10.4 is the "V2.10.3 patch" referred to in previous Newsletter articles, upgraded to a full patch release including all recent bug fixes and application revisions. V2.10.4 will be available for SunOS and Solaris as well as for all new IRAF ports. The Solaris version supports Solaris 2.4 and the Version 3 Sunsoft compilers. The new ports (which were delayed a bit pending completion of IRAF V2.10.4) are for the DEC Alpha running OSF/1 and for Intel PC platforms running Linux, Solaris x86, or BSD. V2.10.4 will be released first for the DEC Alpha and the Sun platforms, with the PC distributions to follow shortly thereafter. Contact us, or check the IRAF network archives, for updated information on the availability of IRAF for any of these platforms. The next IRAF release for all platforms not mentioned here will be V2.11. Mike Fitzpatrick and Jeannette Barnes have been upgrading our World Wide Web pages as we bring more IRAF materials online via the Web. Check our URL: http://iraf.noao.edu/ occasionally to see how this facility is developing. We will continue to add material to the Web pages as time permits. If you have suggestions for items that you would like to see about IRAF on the Web, please let us know. In recent months Frank Valdes continued to work on a new spectroscopic analysis program called SPECTOOL. This is a comprehensive, integrated spectral analysis tool using a sophisticated graphical user interface. The line profile fitting code in the IRAF spectral tasks has been extended to add support for Lorentzian and Voigt profiles to the previously supported Gaussian profiles. Tools are under development for making bad pixel masks from flat fields or ratios of flat fields and applying these masks to data through a new version of FIXPIX based on masks rather than the existing, more limited bad region text descriptions. Finally, Frank has been writing a paper on the algorithms used by FOCAS for matching catalogs; in particular, a new algorithm identifies common objects automatically in two catalogs derived from unregistered images. Lindsey Davis has written a new image matching task LINMATCH. LINMATCH matches the linear intensity scales of a list of images to a reference image using a variety of techniques, including statistical measurements of the intensity in one or more image sections, pixel-to-pixel least squares fits, and previously computed photometry. LINMATCH joins the already completed PSF matching and image registration tasks PSFMATCH and XREGISTER to form the initial version of the IMMATCH package developed in collaboration with Drew Phillips at Lick Observatory. Lindsey has also completed a new task GEOEVAL for computing complex coordinate transformations using fits computed by the GEOMAP task. Work continues on the GUI interface for the aperture photometry package XGPHOT. Recently added features include GUI support for object list management including object selection, deletion, addition, marking, and editing functions. On a final note, Suzanne Jacoby has left the IRAF programming group and has taken up a new role as the NOAO Education Officer. Suzanne had been with the IRAF group since its inception in the early 1980s, and has been an integral part of the IRAF site support services. Anyone writing to iraf@noao.edu is familiar with Suzanne's enthusiastic and efficient solutions to IRAF problems. We wish her success in her new position---she will certainly be missed by all of us in the IRAF community! Doug Tody, Jeannette Barnes
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