A major development for the IRAF project in this past quarter was the award of a three-year NASA ADP grant to IRAF to support the Open IRAF initiative. The Open IRAF initiative will evolve and enhance IRAF in many ways to allow better integration of IRAF with non-IRAF software and data formats, and improve the support for user software development. These enhancements will include improved facilities for host execution of IRAF tasks and scripts, multi-language support, support for host-callable IRAF libraries, and support for dynamically loadable modules. The multi-language support will give the developer a choice of any of several different programming languages including C, Fortran, and probably C++. The Open IRAF funding will also aid our efforts to develop IRAF support for distributed objects and messaging and object component technology. This project represents a collaboration of the IRAF group at NOAO and all the major IRAF development sites within NASA, including HST, AXAF, SAO, and CEA. In addition to allowing this critical work to proceed, this grant represents significant funding coming in from outside NOAO to help support and develop IRAF, something which we especially appreciate in these tight budget times.
The second patch to IRAF V2.10.4 (V2.10.4-p2) is now available for the SunOS, Solaris, Linux (Slackware), and DEC Alpha OSF/1 platforms. There were some minor bug fixes as well as enhancements to support specific outside projects, but from the viewpoint of most users the main reason for its release was platform support, i.e., to support changes to operating system software or compilers. For Solaris/IRAF the patch adds support for Solaris 2.5 and the SunSoft version 4 compilers. This same distribution also supports Solaris 2.3 and 2.4. For Linux/IRAF the patch includes support for ELF-based versions of Linux, but still uses the a.out format binaries (see the README for details on dealing with ELF). For OSF/1, patch 2 was simply a bug fix upgrade since we are still running an older OSF/1 V2.0 operating system on our Dec Alpha. The current OSF1/IRAF release should run fine under OSF/1 V3 but not the newly released Digital Unix 4.0; steps are being taken to upgrade later this year. For a more detailed list of the bug fixes and enhancements included in the patch see the announcement posted to adass.iraf.announce, or visit the URL http://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/web/new_stuff/patch2.html.
IRAF V2.10.4-p2 is also available now for SGI/IRIX (see the iraf/v210/IRIX directory on iraf.noao.edu). This was essentially a new port and is a major upgrade for this platform. The port was done under IRIX 5.3; we plan to upgrade to IRIX 6.x later this year and release a new version of IRIX/IRAF at that time. X11IRAF binaries were also released for this platform, including support for ximtool, xgterm, and xtapemon (see the directory pub/v2103-beta on iraf.noao.edu). We would like to thank Wisconsin and the WIYN Observatory for letting us use their SGI for IRAF support.
IRAF users should look for a new release of the X11IRAF package about the time this Newsletter comes out. This release will include an integral print capability and limited file load/save support for ximtool. The print capability will support output of greyscale and color PostScript to a printer or to an EPS file. The file load/save option will initially support Sun rasterfiles only, but look for extensions to a variety of PC formats plus FITS and IRAF image formats in the future. Beginning with this new release support for the X11IRAF package will be expanded to include all currently supported X11IRAF hosts.
Another current IRAF systems project is the transparency monitor, an automated camera that continually observes Polaris to monitor the transparency of the sky (or at least a portion of the sky). This is a high priority for KPNO and WIYN for monitoring observing conditions during photometric runs and to help manage queue observing. It is an important and interesting project for IRAF as well as it involves developing new capabilities which are important for the future evolution of IRAF, such as distributed objects and messaging, support for heterogeneous systems (integrating IRAF and non-IRAF components), and other elements of the Open IRAF initiative.
Meanwhile work continues on IRAF V2.11, currently running on all the IRAF development systems. V2.11 will add the FITS image kernel and the latest versions of all applications, and will upgrade all the remaining IRAF platforms not already supported by V2.10.4-p2. Support for some older platforms is being dropped while other new platforms are being added. HPUX remains a popular platform and is probably the most significant platform not supported by V2.10.4-p2. VAX/VMS is still supported and V2.11 will add support for OpenVMS. Support for Apple A/UX has been dropped, but MkLinux will be added in the future. VAX/Ultrix support is being dropped but the DECstation running Ultrix will be supported a while longer, assuming we can keep the platform running locally. We are considering dropping support for IBM/AIX as our local machine is no longer able to support newer releases of AIX and we currently do not have the capability in-house to support this platform. Platform support is based in large part on user demand, so please let us know if you are concerned about support for any of these platforms.
As mentioned in the last Newsletter, support for the NOAO Mosaic will be a major project for the IRAF group in the latter half of the year. The NOAO Mosaic is an 8K x 8K CCD mosaic generating 128 MB (64 megapixel) images. Work thus far has concentrated on keywords and the data dictionary, the Mosaic data format, and design of the messaging system and the real time display and mosaic viewer. Although the keyword and data structure definition is still in progress, a draft of the specification is available at http://iraf.noao.edu/projects/ccdmosaic/. Comments on the new keywords are welcome: please contact Frank Valdes (valdes@noao.edu) for further information or feedback. The real time display and mosaic viewer will provide near real time display and quick look analysis of single frame or mosaic data during readout. The facility will be highly extensible to support integration with local instrumentation, to support various messaging systems for data capture, custom data formats, permit on the fly calibration, and so on. Contact Doug Tody (tody@noao.edu) for further information on the Mosaic data system design or the Mosaic RTD/viewer.
As a guest of the Starlink group at RAL, Doug Tody visited the UK in April to give a talk at the annual National Astronomy Meeting in Liverpool on future IRAF developments and IRAF/Starlink collaboration. Similar talks and user discussions took place at Cambridge and Oxford as well. Doug also spent several days working with the Starlink folks at RAL on various projects including Adam/IRAF integration, the UK mirror for the IRAF FTP/Web services (this is now up and running), use of the Starlink SLALIB library in IRAF, plans for the new IRAF Astrometry package, and plans for Gemini data handling.
Lindsey Davis has continued work on the image matching package IMMATCH. Three new image astrometry tasks CCMAP, CCSETWCS, and CCTRAN have been added to the package. The main function of these tasks is to compute a plate solution for an image using a matched pixel and celestial coordinate list, convert the computed plate solution to an image world coordinate system, and store it in the image header where it can be accessed by other world coordinate system driven tasks. The new tasks can also be used to compute simple geometric parameters for images such as plate scale and orientation, and to do simple astrometry. The new tasks are currently available as part of the version of IMMATCH in the iraf ftp archives. Lindsey is also continuing to work on developing the IRAF ASTROMETRY package.
Frank Valdes is working on CCD reduction software for the NOAO CCD Mosaic. This involves defining the data format and upgrading the CCDRED package. He has also been collaborating on making an astronomer-developed package for infrared mosaicing available to the IRAF community. The package is called DIMSUM and was developed by a number of astronomers including Peter Eisenhardt and Mark Dickinson. In June Frank attended the second conference on Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy held at Pennsylvania State University.
Nelson Zarate, who has worked for the past few years in the STSDAS group at STScI, has joined the IRAF group and started work here in July. Nelson is a member of the systems group (along with Mike Fitzpatrick and Rob Seaman) and will be involved in IRAF systems development and support as well as technical/user support.
The IRAF group plans to attend the ADASS '96 Conference in Charlottesville in September. If you are able to come to this Conference please stop by our demo display and see what the future of IRAF has to offer or discuss your ideas about IRAF with any of the IRAF programmers. We hope we see some of you at this very stimulating Conference that fosters discussions among scientists and programmers about reduction and analysis of scientific data.
Many of you have registered with the IRAF project--the main reason for this is to receive the IRAF Newsletter. But over the last few years, due to limited resources, the IRAF Newsletter issues have appeared infrequently. Although we feel a bit guilty about this the infrequent newsletters are offset by the rich assortment of Internet-based IRAF information services that we have added in the past couple of years. These include the IRAF Web pages, the FAQ, the adass.iraf USENET newsgroups, the listserver, the IRAFINFO facility, and the IRAF HotLine. As a further step we have decided to augment the Newsletter by auto-subscribing all registered users for whom we have an e-mail address to the mailing list associated with the adass.iraf.announce newsgroup. This way you will immediately receive any important announcements about new releases of system or application software. The traffic on this mailing list is low and should not be a burden, but instructions will be included with each mailing so that anyone who wishes to unsubscribe, or subscribe to other IRAF newsgroups and their associated mailing lists, can easily do so. We hope you find this additional source of information about IRAF useful. We have not discarded the Newsletter--we expect one to come out with the release of V2.11.
For further information about the IRAF project please see the IRAF Web pages at http://iraf.noao.edu/ or send e-mail to iraf@noao.edu. The adass.iraf newsgroups on USENET provide timely information on IRAF developments and are available for the discussion of IRAF related issues.
Doug Tody, Jeannette Barnes