iraf.net

Rik Hill called from LPL looking for a task to compute an airmass
given a table of RA,DEC,ST and exposure time. There's nothing that does
exactly what he wants, but I wrapped up ASTHEDIT for him (it's not in 2.10.2)
and told him about the CTIO.COMPAIRMASS task. This is also easily doable
with a script he could write.

Nelson Caldwell called with a DOSPLIT question, he was getting an
error message about a "File does not exist" prior to identify. I couldn't
find anything similar in the logs and referred him to Lisa for an answer.

A rather excited user called without giving her name with questions
about running iraf from a remote workstation. She was amazed to find that
logging into the iraf machine from the remote system would do the trick. I
next explained about the way to do image display in such a case, she'll call
back with more questions if she has any.

Scott Wolk called back to work out his tape problems. He didn't have
iraf or system permissions so what we did was set up a personal tapecap file
with the needed changes and defined this from a loginuser.cl. It then seemed
to work, he will get the system guy to make similar changes to the IRAF files.

Vinve Virgiulio(sp?) called from UCSD w/ an SPP programming question.
He wants to call C routines from his SPP but the routines were not being found.
This was caused by the trailing "_" added to the symbol name in his SPP. The
solution is to write C procedures named e.g. "foo_()" and call them as "foo"
from the SPP.

George Hong and Rik Hill called from LPL with problems displaying
images under Solaris V2.3 to SAOimage. The message they originally re-
ported was "write to IPC with no READ", but trapping the SAOimage output
showed it was really a "cannot find imtool configuration table" problem.
I had them install imtoolrc in /usr/local/lib on the solaris machine and
all seems to be well, they'll cal back if the problems continue.

Roy Gal called from Columbia asking if there was a way to convert
all of his Figaro images to IRAF. He can write FITS files but the problem
is that the echelle orders/dispersion in the headers are propagated to IRAF.
I suggested he try to get a listing of the headers and patch the IRAF images
with hedit/hfix, or else re-reduce the data in IRAF. He didn't seem too
disappointed with that.

Ken Mighell called from Columbia trying to remember the name of a
task that displays an image, let's you do photometry, radial profile plots,
surfaces, etc... I said IMEXAMINE and he was once again a happy camper.

Ken Mighell called looking for the Beginner Guide and "Tucson Sun
Network" docs. I pointed him towars ftp/pub and said I didn't think the
network doc would be much use (in the past he's found user 'hints' in these
docs that don't appear elsewhere). He's teaching his student IRAF so I
also suggested he get the exercises.

Jay <somebody> from Middle Tenn. St. College called with problems
uncompressing the distribution files on a VMS system. The error complained
about "an unknown -s flag" in uncompress. We redefined the task and he
got a different error about "512-byte buffer exceeds user limit" (??). It
was getting late there so Jay suggested he re-read the docs and start again
tomorrow. He'll check with the system guys to see if they can help, and
call back if he still has problems.

John Millet (?) from George Mason Univ called with patch questions.
He was gettng the familiar 'snoise' error and then pulled over the patches
and binaries, unpacked them correctly, but was still getting the error.
He just needed to unlearn the task or do a new mkiraf. Next he ran the
task and got a segvio: turns out he specified *.imh where he should have
said *.hhh, it's all working now.

Jim Higdon called from the VLA (we're old friends from Texas) to
followup on John Warren's message of last night to report a "ERROR: OPEN:
File does not exist (tmp4294ha.hhd)" message from MKILLUMCOR. They had
an installation problem (no patches applied to a new installation) which
they fixed to get rid of the 'snoise' error but were still having problems
with mkillumcor. Converting the images to OIF fixed the problem, Frank
will look into it to see if there's a bug in the task.

Kathy Smith from Carlton College called about IRAF and what platforms it
currently runs on.