iraf.net

NUMBER: 561
MODULE: imstatistics, mimstat
SYSTEM: V2.14
DATE: Tue Jul 15 11:03:18 MST 2008
FROM: valdes

BUG: The user supplied upper and lower data limits may be exceeded if clipping is used. For instance, if the limits exclude all pixels the clipping with behave as if no pixels are excluded. If not all pixels are excluded and the clipping thresholds computed (number of sigma * standard deviation) exceed the limit then the clipping threshold is used. The only workaround is to not use clipping if the limit values are supplied or check first with no clipping to see if all pixels are excluded.

STATUS: Fixed for the next release.

This past week, iraf.net registered its 1,000th user. These are people who have taken the time to register after reading a help page, posting a message, or searching for an answer to a question. This excludes the dozen or so spam registrations I kill daily, and so 1000 users represents a legitimate estimate of the actual users of this site.

To each and every one of you: Thanks for your support. I hope you continue to find this site useful, and the future will be as bright as it appears now.

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.

Update: 06/17/08 Applications are now closed.

"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.

STATUS: Fixed for the next release.

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.....
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