The IRAF V2.11 patch promised in the last Newsletter is in preparation now. This will include Y2K support, system support for GUIs, some Open IRAF enhancements, platform support upgrades, and numerous feature enhancements and bug fixes. Most science application enhancements appear between major releases in the layered packages, but the V2.11 system patch will include the sinc interpolation and drizzle resampling enhancements mentioned in the March issue of the Newsletter.
We want to remind you that you will need to update IRAF this year to avoid Y2K-related problems. At least one serious Y2K-related bug has already been found, affecting imheader. A number of Y2K-related "enhancements" are being made as well. The most important of these is converting all IRAF software to support the new Y2K-compliant DATE-OBS standard. These changes will mean that any images written in the year 2000 will have "2000" as the date rather than "00". More subtly, any such images read by the software will be interpreted as having a date of 2000 instead of 1900, which could adversely affect time-dependent astronomical calculations of all sorts. In addition to updating IRAF and all NOAO-supported layered packages, we are working with outside groups such as HST (STSDAS) to see that all the major IRAF packages are updated. See http://iraf.noao.edu/projects/y2k for detailed information on the IRAF Y2K upgrade and testing program.
Solaris 7, which first appeared early in the year, was installed on an IRAF server in February, and tested with the released IRAF V2.11.1 system A detailed report on this was posted to the adass.iraf.system mailing list 11 February (see the IRAF Web pages to subscribe to this or any other IRAF discussion group). Very briefly, the current IRAF V2.11.1 release was prepared for and supports Solaris 2.4, 2.5, and 2.6. It appears to run fine on 2.7, including supporting compilation, with the exception that IRAF networking is broken. We only did rudimentary testing and other Solaris 2.7-related bugs are possible. Full support will be provided in the upcoming IRAF patch.
The PC-IRAF upgrade is on hold awaiting the next IRAF version; it should be out not long after the general IRAF patch is released later this year. RedHat users should be aware that there is a problem running the current version of RedHat-Linux IRAF on the new RedHat 6.0 release. A patch will be available by the time this Newsletter article is published.
One major area of development for the IRAF group in early 1999 was for the science GUIs (these provide GUIs for spectral analysis, interactive image-based aperture photometry, radial velocity analysis, and HTML-based IRAF help browsing). Recent work has focused on the online help and tutorials. These are undergoing internal testing now at NOAO and should be released later this year as an add-on package. The upcoming V2.11 patch, and the latest version of X11IRAF, will be required to run the GUIs.
A second major area for IRAF development in early 1999 has been for the NOAO Mosaic and related instruments. The Mosaic DHS (and the CTIO Arcon software) has been modified to support observing at the WIYN. This system is functioning now and is currently undergoing engineering tests, with switch-over planned for sometime later this year. Finally, work has begun on the Mosaic archive pipeline first mentioned in the last Newsletter. This will provide an automated pipeline and raw data archive for all data taken with the Mosaic. Plans are being made to extend this to other instruments in the future. Eventually we expect that most IRAF-based reductions will be done using automated, GUI and database based, parallelized pipelines such as we are developing for the Mosaic.
For further information about the IRAF project please see the IRAF Web pages at http://iraf.noao.edu/ or send email to iraf@noao.edu. The adass.iraf newsgroups (available on USENET or via a moderated mailing list which you can subscribe to by filling out a form on the IRAF Web page) provide timely information on IRAF developments and are available for the discussion of IRAF related issues.
Doug Tody, Jeannette Barnes