The major focus of the IRAF group for this past quarter has been on V2.11 platform upgrades, i.e., making the new IRAF V2.11 release available on all the various IRAF platforms. This always takes some months after a major release commences, as for each platform we must upgrade the host operating system (and sometimes the hardware as well), re-port the new IRAF version to the platform, run a full suite of tests, and update the release documentation. Half a dozen people are involved in this process and it typically takes at least a month (calendar time) for each platform, but we all save time later on installation and support by doing this work up-front. Platform upgrades are our top priority after a major release, as people are unable to run the new software until we release an upgrade for whatever platform they are using.
The initial releases of V2.11 in June and August 1997 were for our primary development platforms, SunOS and Solaris 2.5. An IRAF patch was released in mid-November to support Solaris 2.4 and Solaris 2.6, which was newly released at that time. In late December the first patch, V2.11.1, was released for SunOS and Solaris (including integrated Solaris 2.6 support), and new platform upgrades were released for the Dec Alpha running Digital Unix V4.0 and for the Hewlett-Packard running HP-UX 10.20.
The most notable change in V2.11.1 for users, other than the expanded platform support, is that IMFORT can now write new images in both old and new IRAF image formats by setting the host environment variable "oifversion" to either 1 (old) or 2 (new, the default). In the initial V2.11 release IMFORT would write new images only in the new image format (reading or updating existing images was no problem). In most cases you should still let IRAF make the default new format image files, but if the files will be read by older IRAF tasks it might be necessary to use the old format (by doing so you give up long file pathnames and machine independence however).
All the new IRAF distributions can be found in the IRAF network archive on iraf.noao.edu in the iraf/v211 directory.
In mid-January the first version of PC-IRAF was released, supporting Slackware Linux V3.3, Red Hat Linux V5.0, and FreeBSD V2.2.5. This release of PC-IRAF was built using IRAF V2.11.1, the same version of IRAF as released for other platforms in late December. The various PC architectures are supported as separate binary architectures within a single IRAF installation. Support for additional platforms is planned in the next PC-IRAF release, e.g., Solaris x86 and MkLinux (for the Macintosh).
V2.11.1 should be available shortly for the SGI and AIX. Platform support for OpenVMS on the Dec Alpha and the VAX, and DEC Ultrix will follow later this winter. As updates for these platforms become available they will be announced on the IRAF mail exploder (newsgroup/mailing-list adass.iraf.announce) and on the IRAF web pages. Please contact the IRAF group if you are uncertain about the availability of IRAF V2.11 for a particular platform.
We had hoped to have a new IRAF Newsletter, with detailed articles on the features of IRAF V2.11, out by this time. We apologize for the delay but the platform upgrades have been our top priority. Look for the Newsletter in the next few weeks.
The IRAF Web pages have been available for some time now through a new mirror site in Japan at http://sinobu.mtk.nao.ac.jp/iraf/web. We are pleased to report that the IRAF FTP archives are also available now through a mirror site in Japan at http://sinobu.mtk.nao. ac.jp/iraf/ftp or ftp://sinobu.mtk.nao.ac.jp/NOAO. We would like to thank Shin-ichi Ichikawa at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan for making these files more accessible for our Japanese and East Asian IRAF users. This is in addition to the existing mirror sites already in place in Europe.
The Open IRAF project got off to a slower start in 1997 than hoped, due to some hard deadlines for the V2.11 release, STIS/NICMOS data reduction support, and the NOAO Mosaic project. Despite these distractions major work was done during 1997 on the Message Bus, which will be the basis for the architecture of the future system. Several months were spent on research into message bus and distributed shared object technology, and a prototype message bus (based on PVM) was implemented and used in the Mosaic project. In addition, some elements of the multi-language support planned for Open IRAF were included in V2.11. The Open IRAF project is now starting to ramp up, and this should be our largest effort shortly when the major V2.11 platform upgrades are out of the way. The Open IRAF effort is funded in part by a grant from the NASA ADP program.
Frank Valdes has continued to make major enhancements to the data reduction software for the NOAO CCD Mosaic. A nearly complete version of the basic phase 1 software is now available with a user's guide (contact Frank (fvaldes@noao.edu) for more information). Work will continue on this version to finish documentation and minor loose ends before going on to the phase 2 software. As part of phase 2, Frank is working on designing how pixel masks and uncertainty information can be integrated into the Mosaic data reductions and all of NOAO IRAF. This work is being coordinated with a similar effort at STScI to support the HST Advanced Camera within STSDAS.
Lindsey Davis has added two new function drivers TNX (tangent plane plus polynomial correction terms) and ZPX (zenithal radial polynomials plus polynomial correction terms) to the IRAF V2.11.1 world coordinate system interface MWCS. The new function drivers are capable of accurately describing optical systems with significant radial distortion, e.g., the NOAO Mosaic, as well as accounting for the effects of errors in the tangent point, tilt, etc. Support for writing the new TNX and ZPX coordinate systems to image headers has been added to the IMAGES.IMCOORDS package tasks CCMAP and CCSETWCS. Existing IRAF tasks which evaluate world coordinates, e.g., LISTPIXELS, IMEXAMINE, etc., will automatically understand the new systems. Lindsey has also recently added support for 2D sinc interpolation to the image interpolation package IMINTERP. Most recently support for the dithering algorithm has been added as well. This work is part of the IRAF astrometry effort, and is also part of our efforts to help determine what is needed in FITS WCS to support ground based astrometry (FITS WCS is an existing proposal by Greisen and Calabretta for a world coordinate system representation for FITS images).
Rob Seaman, in addition to supporting KPNO observing and Save-the-Bits (STB), is working on an upcoming update of STB that will add support for writable CD-Rs and add several other features such as support for multi-extension FITS input files. The next update of STB will be available for Solaris as well as SunOS. This new version of STB will be used to archive data from WIYN and the NOAO Mosaic as well as the current general archives for both KPNO and CTIO. STB is available for use by observatories outside of NOAO and is currently running at both the Keck and Lick Observatories.
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 on USENET (also available via mailing list subscription 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