IRAF V2.14 -- Critical Update Available

The initial release of IRAF V2.14 is now available from links in the Downloads area and on the IRAF archive at iraf.noao.edu. The release is for PC-IRAF systems only (Linux, Mac OSX (Intel or PPC) and Cygwin). Additional binaries and platforms will be added in subsequent releases. For the impatient, the README file is attached in the body of the story.

Update (2/19/08) Solaris x86 binaries have been added to the distribution.

Critical Update (1/14/08) A crticial bug has been discovered in an IMIO interface routine that affects ALL tasks linked against V2.14. This bug causes bogus pixel values to be returned leading to corrupted images and/or unexplained system crashes. All users are strongly encouraged to re-install the IB and NB binary distributions with patched versions from the download area ASAP. Reinstalling the source distribution is NOT required (but does include the IMEDIT change mentioned below). We apologize for the oversight, please post problems or questions as they arise, see the README file addendum for details.

Errata: (12/18/07)The IMEDIT task has new parameters that are missing from the v2.14 distribution file. See this thread for details.

The 2008 NVO Summer School (to be held in Santa Fe, NM Sep 3-11) is now accepting applications at the NVOSS website

In this nine-day, hands-on program, participants will work with experienced NVO users and software specialists to become familiar with how to discover, access, visualize, and analyze data with the Virtual Observatory. Those attending will be introduced to VO tools and utilities by using them to accomplish a variety of research goals. Some of the research tasks that will be addressed include data mining, multiwavelength analysis, and temporal astronomy. In the latter part of the summer school, small teams will pursue their own VO-enabled projects.

"The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astronomical Research", published as an ASP Conference Series Volume No. 382, is now available from the ASP website: http://www.astrosociety.org/CS382.html. The price is just $35 for 750 pages of VO goodness and includes a software CD.

This volume is a collection of the NVO Summer School lectures and tutorials. It includes a complete set of software libraries and worked examples to guide the astronomer/software developer through the process of developing VO-enabled programs in a variety of programming languages and scripting environments. It is an essential guide for those interested in combining data from diverse and distributed astronomical data collections, for accessing large astronomical survey databases, and for making available to the research community one's own data collections and catalogs. In addition, the introductory material describes the origin of the Virtual Observatory and its potential role in astronomical research. Several chapters that describe research results obtained by participants in the NVO Summer Schools using VO tools and technologies are also included.

You read it correctly, IRAF now runs on an iPod/iPhone. After all, a 400Mhz CPU and >100Mb of RAM was a supercomputer back in the day, and the OS is a Mac OSX 10.5 micro-kernel. Besides, it was too cool/absurd not to try it. The result is an IRAF system (and external packages) capable of doing real science on an iPhone/iPod, a first for astronomy.

The port itself was straightforward, the only hard part was building a cross-compiler to produce binaries for the ARM processor. Of course there's no native graphics or image display, but you can login to the device remotely and use an Xterm termiinal or XImtool/DS9 for the image display on your laptop. but is it really useful for anything other than impressing your friends? Only time will tell.

The system installs using the AppTapp installer on a jailbroken device, and is ready to run immediately. See below for additional requirements and information, including benchmarks and screenshots.

NUMBER: 560
MODULE: CCFIND
SYSTEM: V2.14
DATE: Wed Jan 23 15:56:04 MST 2008
FROM: fitz

BUG: For an image with a ZPN projection, the transform code in mwcs tries to reference the parent image to get the PV matrix keywords. This task called sk_decwcs() to open the WCS, but this routine then unmaps the image. When the task later uses the saved 'mw' pointer to transform coords the ZPN reference to the parent image is invalid and results in a segfault. Changed the code to call sk_decim() directly and operate on the currently open image instead.

There is no workaround other than to not set the 'usewcs' parameter and to set the WCS using the other parameters. Contact iraf.net for a new binary if needed.

For those of you who got an iPhone or iPod Touch recently, a new web app called iPortal is available for browsing the VO Registry and Data services using only the native Safari browser. To get started, point your iPhone/iPod to http://iraf-nvo.noao.edu/iportal

A web page description with a test interface and screenshots is also available. This app provides access to hundreds of image and catalog services, and thousands of published journal tables, from a mobile device. Image displays and table scrolling use the native interfaces of the device.

See below for a full list of features.

A new set of tools for easily accessing Virtual Observatory data from the command-line (and thus scripting environments) is now available for testing. These tasks permit searching for VO resources and the query/access of image and catalog data from more that 15,000 sources. A key design point is the use of astronomer-friendly terms in specifying resources, general search capability (e.g. all X-ray image services), and a variety of output formats (default is CSV for easy manipulation by other tools).

The VO-CLI Project Home Page contains additional information, runnable examples, download instructions, as well as a guided tour of the software. These tools were developed as part of a larger VOClient project designed to provide a multi-language interface to VO data and services. They will be used in the upcoming IRAF NVO package but as host tools can be used from any environment. Examples of what you can do include: keyword searches to find relevant VO resources, process queries for lists of positions, easily find all HST data for a given object, or simply resolve and object name to its coordinates.

Since this is a testing release, feedback in the forums or comments is especially appreciated. Detailed examples of how to use the main data query/access task are shown in the main body of the story.

It's amazing what you find with Google these days.....
In The Know: White House Announces 'Everything Is Great In Iraf'

Discussions have been underway for a while within NOAO regarding how best to balance the needs of internal projects, the iraf.net activities, and new projects. The result is a mutual collaboration in which IRAF development is resuming within NOAO on a modest scale, and the community support and development activities here will be encouraged and supported to some extent for those NOAO employees supporting this site (i.e. some work on this site is now/again part of our day-job).

It has been a while since the last V2.13 release, the reason can now be made clear: The effort has been going into an official V2.14 release from NOAO. This will additionally include a number of new external packages and other software that will be demonstrated at ADASS next month, and will be released in the very near future.

The ASTCAT package provides tools to get catalogs from web sites that support HTTP/Get URLs which return a text table. It is challenge to discover these sites and keep the the ASTCAT database up-to-date. Two important catalogs are the 2MASS point source catalog and the USNO-B1 catalog.