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.

For quite a while now users have been running into problems associated with the ESO convention of using HIERARCH keywords in their headers. This became a common enough issue that we developed a script to help deal with it. That script never made it into the core system, but the explanatory text and script itself is posted here.

A new task allows taking a list of RA, Dec, and data, such as image names, that one wants to group into sublists. The grouping is based on a minimum separation in RA and Dec. The SKYGROUP help page is available from this site already, the code itself is in the body of the message and in the upcoming release in the NPROTO package.

The calculation of the separation between two celestial points is a standard astronomical utility. In SPP routines may be found in the math$slalib package. At the CL level there is astcalc and asthedit. However those are fairly complex and in scripts one would like to have a simple interface. People can write their own script code but I thought it would be useful to provide one. The SKYSEP help page is already available from this site, the script is in the body of the story and will be available in the upcoming release in the NPROTO package.

One of the long-forgotten ADASS newsgroups was adass.iraf.sources, the point of which was to allow users to post small bits of code others may find useful. While we work to decide how we'll organize something similar we'll simply post the code in a new topic.

Weidong Li at UCBerkeley asked recently how one can use the coefficients produced by CURFIT to evaluate the fit at arbitrary points. After a quick pointer, and in what we hope will be an iraf.net tradition, he coded a solution and agreed to share it here. Thanks Weidong!