IRAF Support From iraf.net

As of January 1, 2006 the email-based helpdesk system, iraf@noao.edu, will no longer be supported by NOAO. Users accustomed to receiving personal replies to questions will need to now become more comfortable with asking questions in a public forum, however in many cases the question will have already been answered in the archived mail. The advantage to this new approach is that others in the audience may have had similar problems and will benefit from the shared reply. The advantage for us is that users can now discuss topics amongst themselves and so some of the more common problems may be answered by people aside from the IRAF programmers.

In this forum-based approach to support, IRAF developers will continue to answer questions and give expert advice as always, but we now also bring in the wider experience of the users. Astronomy software in general is not what is used to be and many major systems are not well supported yet remain in everyday use. While primarily an IRAF support site, we hope the website and the forums both evolve into a more general astronomy software community site. Your participation in this process will help us achieve that goal.

How You Can Help

Setting up a web site and installing forum software is not a lot of work, in fact not much more work than it takes to answer the email helpdesk this site is meant to replace. But anyone familiar with the old IRAF website will quickly see that what we're trying to do here is more than simply updating the look and reorganizing things a bit.

The site is still evolving and will continue to do so over the first few months. The work of creating it in the first place is done and the bills are paid to keep the site up for at least a year, but in order to keep the site going and to make this a place for the astronomical software community as a whole we need your help! Please:

Register As A User

Forum and story postings may be done anonymously, but in order to get a better sense of who uses this site please consider registering as a user. This will also allow us to contact users in case the site has problems, and will also allow users to contact each other. Please see our Privacy Policy for assurances that registering is a safe thing to do.

Search for Answers Before Posting Questions

IRAF Developers will continue to answer user questions in forums when necessary, but many of the questions asked will have been answered previously and are available by searching the sitemail archives or in the FAQ.

Participate in Forums

Initially the site is meant to be an IRF Help Desk replacement, however we envision this becoming a general forum for the wider Astronomy Software community. If you read the forums and know the answer to a posted question (and we know at least some of you will), please consider answering it. Similarly, feel free to start a thread on any astronomy software system, and if there is wide enough interest simply contact admin@iraf.net to request that a new forum be created.

Submit Content

The blog format of the homepage is intentional and is meant to allow announcements/stories to be posted on more than just IRAF. We would like this site to be the "Slashdot of Astronomy Software" and news of releases of software (IRAF or otherwise), topics of interest to the ADASS regulars or NVO users are always welcomed.

Additionally, we need people to suggest links to what they consider to be useful pages (e.g. local IRAF tutorial documents, external packages, software tools, etc). We are investigating now how to setup a user-contributed software repository and job board, if you are interested in seeing these happy please contact us.

Buy Our Stuff

Okay, so we've been too busy to really have much stuff yet, but we do have plans to offer highly prestigious T-shirts, coffee mugs, mousepads and software CDs. The link above is a prototype shop, more options will be available soon. Funds raised from these items will be used to pay the hosting charges and hopefully we'll raise enough to buy equipment to do the types of platform support we couldn't otherwise manage. The profit margin is small so feel free to order more than one!

Donate

If this site has saved you valuable time, or you think it is simply worth supporting, we are also happy to take donations using the "Make a Donation" button on the left panel. As a "Thank You", all donations of $10US or more will bestow upon the donor a highly prized "@iraf.net" email address valid for the life of this site. Simply request one when making your donation.

With Apple's announcement of their move to Intel-based processors, and with the number of astronomers switching to Macs, our first fundraising effort will be to help with the purchase of a Mac/Intel system to be used for an IRAF port, as well as for Linux (and possibly Cygwin) support under VirtualPC. If you would like to the a Mac/Intel IRAF port sooner rather than later, please consider donating what you might spend on the software had it come from a commercial vendor.

We do not plan to ever charge for support or software, however your donations and desire for T-shirts and mouse pads will help keep this site independently operating. Thank you in advance for your help!

Put In a Good Word

Lastly, if you've been inspired by this site (or think you can do better) and are looking for a Web Hosting Provider, we've been very pleased with the vendor hosting this site now. Simply click on the graphic below and if you sign up with them we'll get a bounty to help support this site. If that's not quite your speed, please help by spreading the word about this site to those who might be interested.