The Science Software Branch of the Space Telescope Science Institute wishes to announce the availability of version 3.11 of the Space Telescope Science Data Analysis Software (STSDAS). Concurrent with the STSDAS release, we have also released v3.11 of the TABLES external package. ...

See below for further information and changelog.

Note: OSX (PPC) and Tiger-compatible binaries may be found in the iraf.net download area.

Both of these packages are layered upon IRAF as external packages; it is therefore necessary to obtain and install IRAF (from http://iraf.noao.edu) before installing TABLES and STSDAS. STSDAS is linked against libraries in TABLES, so TABLES must be installed before STSDAS.

This release of STSDAS contains changes to NICMOS, ACS, WFPC/CALWP2, COS, WFC3, and the Dither packages. This release includes the same versions of the calibration software used in the pipeline to support all active HST instruments after Servicing Mission 4, including the new instrument Wide Field Camera 3(WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(COS).

STSDAS also includes some Python-based tasks; running these requires the STScI Python Libraries to be installed (all the non-Python tasks can be used in the traditional way and do not require Python or the STScI Python libraries). These tasks can only be run from PyRAF using standard IRAF CL task syntax, or within Python scripts using Python syntax.

The Science Software Branch of STScI also wishes to announce the availability of version 2.9 of STSCI_PYTHON. Stsci_python is a collection of Python modules, packages and C extensions that has been developed to provide a general astronomical data analysis infrastructure. They can be used for Python tasks that are accessible from within STSDAS when running under PyRAF or standalone from within Python.

All tasks in this release of STScI_Python rely on the use of numpy for array operations. All references to numarray and Numeric have been removed from the code, with support no longer being provided for use of numarray or Numeric.

This distribution continues to develop packages with tasks specific to each HST instrument, with updates being made to code for NICMOS and COS. This release also contains an updated version of Multidrizzle and PyDrizzle as used by the HST ACS and WFPC2 pipelines, along with significantly updated versions of PyFITS and PyRAF. Use of the Python tasks requires upgrading to this version of STSCI_PYTHON.

No More support for numarray

Numarray is no longer used by tasks within STScI_Python. You are advised to migrate to numpy to use this release, as no further support will be provided for the use of numarray.

Information on making the switch to numpy from numarray can be found in this document:

http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/numarray/numarray2numpy.pdf


Platform Support

This release does not contain STSDAS/Tables binaries for PowerPC Macintosh systems. However, there are no known reasons why a user could not build this package from source code on a PowerPC using the installation instructions for STSDAS.

STSDAS/Tables Binaries for this release were built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Solaris 5.8, and Mac OS X 10.5 (Intel architecture only).

STSDAS/Tables Binaries were built with IRAF 2.14, except for Solaris, which were built with IRAF 2.12.2a. IRAF is available from https://iraf.net.

In addition, this distribution of STScI_Python was tested to correctly support installation on Linux, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and Solaris (with some limitations for PyRAF), while also being provided (without PyRAF) for installation under Windows.

STSCI_Python on WINDOWS

This release includes a port of stsci_python that runs natively under Windows. Although IRAF is now available for running under Cygwin, PyRAF is not yet available for use under Windows. This means that, in this release, all the tasks in the STScI_Python distribution will be run under Python (or preferably, IPython) on Windows using Python syntax rather than a parameter-based interface provided by PyRAF and IRAF.

The primary requirement is that the Windows executables were built against and, therefore, can run only under Python 2.5.

WHERE TO OBTAIN THIS SOFTWARE

STSDAS/TABLES v3.11 can be downloaded from the STSDAS web site

http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/stsdas/download

Installation instructions are available on the web site. Precompiled binaries also exist for some of the ports supported by NOAO, including Sun Solaris, RedHat Linux and Mac OS X.

STSCI_PYTHON v 2.9 be downloaded from the PyRAF web site

http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyraf/stsci_python/current/download

Installation instructions are available from the PyRAF web site, with support for installations on Sun Solaris, RedHat Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

Please contact us through e-mail (help@stsci.edu), by telephone at (410) 338-1082.

Comments (0)