                                              May 1999  (Michael Hoenig)

Cambridge Infra-Red Data Reduction software (CIRDR) news


Only marginally less eagerly anticipated than a cure for cancer and the
Millenium Dome, version 1.0 of CIRDR, the CIRSI data reduction package
running under IRAF, has now been released. I have done away with the
0.0.1-style version labelling, and this version is also no longer an
"EXPERIMENTAL" one. The follwing is a list of changes since the previous
version, 0.0.3 (in no particular order):

-Processing of a series of single quadrants, as would be used for standard
star observations, now works.

-CIRMOS would crash with a divide by zero error when the preview option
(disp_img) was switched off. Now fixed.

-Creation of the sky image now uses true median values obtained from
GSTATISTICS (a task, from the STSDAS package, similar to IMSTATISTICS), as
opposed to the scale="median" option in IMCOMBINE.

-Sky images now each have a unique name, containing information on the
run numbers they were produced from. The old problem with successive sky
images being overwritten is thus solved.

-CNDRPROC can now process reset-corrected data, as will be coming out of
Pixcel during the current Chile observing run.

-CNDRPROC now can also process pre-assembled data (ie. single chips as
opposed to the 4 constituent quadrants). This required extensive
re-writing of the many underlying list-creating and processing tasks.

-A bizarre procedure in CHIPTRANS (rotates the images so North is on top),
which would perform double the required image I/O operations, has now been
changed back to a more efficient algorithm.

-Due to the fact that we only ever used a single loop ("fold") in our NDR
observations, the _1p images that are left over at the end of reduction
are redundant; these are now deleted.

-The ability to specify just a single run number in CNDRPROC was broken;
now fixed.

-All of the screen output and the prompts in the main tasks have now been
rewritten in more accessible English.

-IMCOMBINEs (for the purpose of combining multiple loops) were being
performed even when only 1 loop was present. Fixed.

-The sub-packages have been restructured:
 *The division between the CPREPROC and CREDUCT packages in CQLOOK was
 somewhat arbitrary; therefore all the commonly used tasks (CNDRPROC,
 CIRDITHER, etc.) are now in CREDUCT.
 *CPLINE, the pipeline package, is now no more (since it never did work as
 was intended). It is now called C2RED (which itself was previously a
 sub-package of CPLINE).
 *Two new sub-packages in CIRCONTRIB: MEG, which contains some useful
 tasks for second-pass sky subtraction and destriping, written by Meghan
 Gray; and MHOENIG, which contains Michael Hoenig's various tasks for
 determining the gain from test data and other stuff.
 Both these packages are poorly documented and hence you are advised to
 seek out the authors for help if you would like to use them.

-And the annoying beeps while processing are now no more!

It should be noted that in its current form, CIRDR is unable to properly
process RRR (Read-Reset-Read mode) data; there is a task, CRRRPROC,
written for this purpose, however it is now all but obsolete.
It is possible there will be a task for reducing RRR data in a future
release of CIRDR.


Setup information: for new users, please be sure to include the following
lines in your ~/iraf/loginuser.cl file:

reset cirdr = "/home/cirsi/ircsoft/cirdr/"
cl < cirdr$cirdr_inst.cl
flpr
keep

If you haven't got a loginuser.cl yet, just create one from scratch and
put these lines in it.
For users of previous versions of CIRDR, it is strongly recommended that
you unlearn all of your CIRDR tasks, or better still, delete all your
*.par files in your ~/iraf/uparm/ directory - several of the parameters
have changed.

Also, the following lines need to go in your .tcshrc (_not_ .mytcshrc), as
close to the beginning of the file as posible:

# define path for CIRDR foreign commands
if ( -e /home/cirsi/cirdr_setup) then
  source /home/cirsi/cirdr_setup
else
  echo 'Warning: cirdr_setup is missing'
endif

I think that's all I have to say for now. Have fun using CIRDR, and please
do get in touch with me if you think you have discovered any bugs...

Best Regards,


Mike


