IRAF Version 2.11 Release

We include here only a brief summary of the additions and enhancements to IRAF included in the release of V2.11. A more complete revisions summary will be provided with the release. This is a major IRAF release and it will be available for all supported IRAF platforms. Beta testing is being done on Sun platforms and we will release for this platform first (both SunOS and Solaris), but the other major platforms should follow shortly thereafter and distributions for all supported platforms should be available by the end of the summer.

A partial list of system changes:

• SunOS/IRAF and Solaris/IRAF have been merged, and a single IRAF installation can now support both at the same time if all the necessary binaries are installed.

• The tapecap mechanism, used to interface magtape devices, has been modified to allow a single shared IRAF installation to more easily support multiple hosts. Each host can have its own tapecap file, e.g., tapecap.ursa, tapecap.tofu, and so on. This feature is useful for example if a number of workstations, each with a local tape drive, mount an IRAF installation maintained on a central server.

• A new image kernel, the FITS image kernel, has been added to support direct runtime access to disk FITS images. All IRAF tasks will now be able to read and write FITS images as well as all the other supported IRAF image formats. Various other FITS support has been added as well, e.g., to support the IMAGE extension and multi-extension FITS files.

• The binary disk file format for the default runtime IRAF image format (.imh images) has changed. This change was necessary to allow for longer file path names. Images produced from earlier versions of IRAF are transparently readable with IRAF V2.11 but not vice versa. The path length for header and pixel files can now be up to 255 characters long.

• Since we had to change the file format of .imh images we took the opportunity to also make the format machine independent. Images now have byte-packed headers and the pixel data is byte-swapped and transparently readable on any IEEE-compatible host. This includes all modern platforms, the most notable exception being the VAX.

• The maximum number of open IRAF logical files was increased from 128 to 256. This is a benefit to tasks such as IMCOMBINE which must simultaneously access a large number of images.

• Various buffer limits were increased throughout the system:

  • The IRAF line buffer length was increased from 162 to 1024 characters.

  • The command buffer size is now 2048 characters long (the old limit was 1024).

  • IRAF file names can now be up to 256 characters long. Pathnames can be up to 512 characters. The root portion of a filename can be up to 128 characters.

• A number of new tasks were added to the IMAGES package and as a result the package had to be reorganized as it was getting too large. This reorganization should be transparent to the user and should not affect existing scripts, except for any task parameter changes.

• The Starlink positional astronomy library SLALIB was added to the math package.

• Various QPOE bugs were fixed and enhancements added in support of the the PROS and AXAF projects.

• The IRAF software development tools XC and MKPKG and the IRAF C runtime library LIBC were modified to improve support for C language programming, as an early part of the Open IRAF initiative.

A partial list of package changes:

• The tasks from the external package IMCNV (image convert) were merged into the DATAIO package. This includes tasks used to import and export numerous external image formats.

• The external package IMMATCH (image matching) was added to the IMAGES package.

• Most of the tasks in the external NMISC package have been incorporated into V2.11.

• The old VTEL (vacuum telescope data reduction) package has been removed from the NOAO distribution and moved to the NSO external package, which contains a newer version of VTEL and a number of other packages and tasks used for Solar data.

New tasks: there are roughly 35 new tasks in V2.11. 24 of these new tasks are in the reorganized IMAGES package.

Modified tasks: Over 75 tasks have been modified or have had parameter file changes.

A complete list of changes will be available in the IRAF Web pages at the time of the release of V2.11.

Doug Tody