Astronomical Software

AIPS

​AIPS, the NRAO Astronomical Image Processing System is used primarily for reducing data from synthesis radio telescopes. General information is given in the ​AIPS FAQ. We currently have version 31DEC06 installed.

CIAO

​CIAO, is a data analysis system written for the needs of users of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Because Chandra is the first mission with 4-dimensional data (2 spatial, time, energy) in which each dimension has many independent elements, CIAO was built to handle N-dimensional data without concern about which particular axes were being analyzed. Also, apart from a few Chandra instrument tools, CIAO is mission independent.

IRAF

​IRAF is a heterogeneous collection of routines and packages for all sorts of tasks, but it is first of all a data reduction environment, for which their is extensive ​on-line documentation.

PYRAF

​PyRAF is a new command language for IRAF based on the Python scripting language. It is useful both for interactive data analysis and for writing analysis scripts. PyRAF coexists with the current IRAF CL. We currently have version v1.2.1 installed, which includes a number new PyRAF packages for the HST instruments e.g. ​Pydrizzle and ​Multidrizzle.

FFTW

​FFTW is a C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in one or more dimensions, of arbitrary input size, and of both real and complex data (as well as of even/odd data, i.e. the discrete cosine/sine transforms or DCT/DST). The FFTW package was developed at MIT by Matteo Frigo and Steven G. Johnson. Our workstation have version 3 installed.

GNU scientific library

GNU Scientific Library (GSL)

HEASOFT

​HEASOFT is a unified release of the FTOOLS and XANADU Software Packages

XANADU High-level, multi-mission tasks for X-ray astronomical spectral, timing, and imaging data analysis FTOOLS General and mission-specific tools to manipulate FITS files FITSIO Core library responsible for reading and writing FITS files (distributed with FTOOLS) fv General FITS file browser/editor/plotter with a graphical user interface (distributed with FTOOLS) XSTAR Tool for calculating the physical conditions and emission spectra of photoionized gases Hera You may interactively run the Xanadu and FTOOLS software on the Hera server machines at the HEASARC to analyze any of the data files in the Browse archive. The current version of HEAsoft is 6.0.4 (November 28 2005)

IDL

​IDL, the Interactive Data Language, or IDL, is a product of Research Systems Inc (RSI). It is a package designed to reduce, analyse and display scientific data and images. IDL can be used for tasks such as: Line drawing and fitting, contour and surface plotting, animation. Matrix operations, solving nonlinear equations, ffts etc. Writing functions and procedures. and much more. More extensive information is given in the IDL FAQ. We currently have IDL 6.2 installed.

TeXtoIDL

​TeXtoIDL: The purpose of the TeXtoIDL routines is to make it simple to use Greek letters, subscripts and superscripts in making labels for plots in IDL. This is accomplished by allowing the user to use TeX control sequences for Greek letters and special symbols and for sub/superscripts. The TeX control sequences are simple and easy to remember, especially if you already use TeX for writing papers (for those unfamiliar with TeX, an explanation of that notation is below). The translation is done for either vector or PostScript fonts.

IDLWAVE

​IDLWAVE: This package has been installed as part of Emacs to enable it to understand IDL syntax, which is very useful when writing IDL scripts. A number of lines should be added to your ~/.emacs file, and IDLWAVE online information which can be viewed with `M-x idlwave-info', or follow the Menu entry in the IDLWAVE menu. IDLWAVE also enables running an IDL shell within emacs - type:

M-X idlwave-shell

which runs your settup defined by the environment variable IDL_STARTUP.

KARMA

​KARMA is a toolkit for interprocess communications, authentication, encryption, graphics display, user interface and manipulating the Karma network data structure. It contains KarmaLib (the structured libraries and API) and a large number of modules (applications) to perform many standard tasks. A suite of visualisation tools are distributed with the library.

LApack

​LAPACK is written in Fortran77 and provides routines for solving systems of simultaneous linear equations, least-squares solutions of linear systems of equations, eigenvalue problems, and singular value problems. The associated matrix factorizations (LU, Cholesky, QR, SVD, Schur, generalized Schur) are also provided, as are related computations such as reordering of the Schur factorizations and estimating condition numbers. Dense and banded matrices are handled, but not general sparse matrices. In all areas, similar functionality is provided for real and complex matrices, in both single and double precision.

MIRIAD

​MIRIAD is radio interferometry data reduction package. It has particular emphasis on aspects of interest to users of the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). Miriad can be used for the reduction of continuum and spectral line experiments. Miriad, in particular, supports a number of niche areas. These include calibration and analysis of polarimetric data from the ATCA, multi-frequency synthesis imaging, mosaicing, ATCA pulsar bin mode, and some spectral line observing applications (e.g. Zeeman experiments).

PHYSICA

​PHYSICA is a high level, interactive programming environment with user friendly graphics and sophisticated mathematical analysis capabilities. Version 2.77

SAS

​SAS is the XMM-Newton Science Analysis System. We currently have version 6.5.0 installed.

STSDAS

​STSDAS is the software for reducing and analyzing data from the Hubble Space Telescope. It is layered on top of IRAF and provides general purpose tools for astronomical data analysis as well as routines specifically designed for HST analysis. We currently have version 3.4 installed.

SCILAB

​Scilab is a scientific software package for numerical computations providing a powerful open computing environment for engineering and scientific applications. Scilab includes hundreds of mathematical functions with the possibility to add interactively programs from various languages (C, Fortran...). It has sophisticated data structures (including lists, polynomials, rational functions, linear systems...), an interpreter and a high level programming language.

Spitzer tools

​Spitzer telescope observation preparation tool (SPOT). SPOT is the observation preparation tool for the Spitzer telescope. Leopard is the software package used to download data. A ​SPOT User Guide and ​Leopard User Guide are available. We currently have version Spitzer-pride13_0_3 installed.

TEMPO

​Tempo is a program for the analysis of pulsar timing data. Pulsar rotation, astrometric, and binary parameters are deduced by fitting models to pulse times of arrival measured at one or more terrestrial observatories. Tempo is maintained and distributed by Princeton University and the Australia Telescope National Facility. The code is freely available, and others are encouraged to extend, modify, and improve it as they see fit.

Image Display Programs

ds9

SAOImage ​DS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application. DS9 supports FITS images and binary tables, multiple frame buffers, region manipulation, and many scale algorithms and colormaps. It provides for easy communication with external analysis tasks and is highly configurable and extensible. The currently installed version is 4.0b8.

PGPLOT

​PGPLOT is a large subroutine library for plotting scientific data. The PGPLOT Graphics Subroutine Library is a Fortran- or C-callable, device-independent graphics package for making simple scientific graphs. It is intended for making graphical images of publication quality with minimum effort on the part of the user. For most applications, the program can be device-independent, and the output can be directed to the appropriate device at run time.

ImageMagick

​ImageMagick®, is a free software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images. It can read, convert and write images in a large variety of formats. Images can be cropped, colors can be changed, various effects can be applied, images can be rotated and combined, and text, lines, polygons, ellipses and Bézier curves can be added to images and stretched and rotated. version

Display/documents

LaTeX

Supermongo (sm)

​Supermongo (sm) is a flexible graphics package. An on-line guide and sm tutorial are available. SM's great strength is that you can define macros to perform common tasks. SM can also emulate regular Mongo - to do this issue the command `compatible'. Examples of sm macros can be found in /data/system/user_guide/sm/. The version installed is sm 2_4_26

To run sm just type:

sm : quit

To get help type:

sm -help

ghostview

xv

xfig

acroread

OpenOffice

E-mail and Browsers

Mozilla

Firefox

Thunderbird

Plugins for Browsers

Flash

Sun JRE 1.5

Pine

Mutt

EDITORS

emacs

To start Emacs, just type emacs &. For an introduction to Emacs type C-h t inside Emacs to enter the Emacs tutorial. The AucTeX information on the IoA Local Page describes a powerful interface to writing LaTeX in Emacs.

You can configure Emacs to your hearts content by editing your own version of the Emacs configuration file ~/.emacs (a default .emacs file can be copied from /public/Default_Scripts/.emacs, which contains the following lines and some additional features that may be useful) e.g. for editing text of a specific type that emacs knows about, such as fortran, tex, c or idl script code, you should switch to the appropriate major mode so that coloured text can be used to highlight different sections of text, add the following lines to this file:

(setq font-lock-face-attributes

'((font-lock-comment-face "SeaGreen" nil nil t nil nil)

(font-lock-variable-name-face "blue") (font-lock-string-face "red") (font-lock-function-name-face "Magenta") (font-lock-keyword-face "blue") (font-lock-type-face "MediumOrchid") (font-lock-reference-face "orchid")))

(setq emacs-lisp-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock) (setq latex-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock) (setq tex-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock) (setq fortran-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock) (setq info-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock) (setq dired-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock)

For IDL scripts (.pro files) you can similar obtain coloured text and recognise IDL syntax by adding the lines:

(autoload 'idlwave-mode "idlwave" "IDLWAVE Mode" t) (autoload 'idlwave-shell "idlw-shell" "IDLWAVE Shell" t) (setq auto-mode-alist (cons '("
.pro
'" . idlwave-mode) auto-mode-alist)) (setq idlwave-help-directory "/usr/local/etc") (add-hook 'idlwave-mode-hook 'turn-on-font-lock)

vi vi(m)

vi stands for VIsual editor, and it is the standard UNIX editor. As such it is widely used. The advantage of vi is that whatever linux/Unix system you use, there will be a version of vi there, it is also compact and quick, much quicker to start up than for instance emacs or nedit. The downside is that it is difficult to learn, more so than emacs. If you are not going to use it, you only need to know that you get out of it by typing :q or :q! to avoid saving the file.

Language Compilers

perl

PerlDL

awk

gcc

c++

g77 (fortran)

cvs

python

tcl/tk

g95

gfortran

R