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eclipse newsletter 3.7 |
Dear eclipse users,
Many new features again in this new release! Actually, eclipse has
evolved so much over the past years that there is little code (if
any) that has survived since the beginning. The last antique piece
was the FITS reader, which has provided its services until last
month when it was decommissioned. In an attempt to provide support
for the more exotic file formats expected from instruments like WFI,
CONICA, or ISAAC (in spectroscopy mode), the new FITS library makes
it easier to access extensions and much cleaner to program.
This new library is composed of half a dozen files covering 2000
lines of code (including comments and blank lines!), and has taken
no more than 5 days to write, having in mind the current and
expecting the future requirements for a FITS handling library. It
will probably be distributed also as a stand-alone package that
developers might want to use for their own purpose, without having
to buy into the whole eclipse library.
Major steps have also been done in the memory handling scheme to
support various file loading methods. There is now a notion of file
pointer references and a kind of garbage collector to handle the
mapping of external files, which should make memory handling as a
whole easier to program and more efficient.
Another achievement is the release of graphical user interfaces for
our two most used commands: jitter and spjitter. We have also done
some work to be able to produce such GUIs for all jitter-like
commands we will have to deliver for CONICA. It should be possible
to generate such GUIs with little effort, and make sure they are
always in sync with the latest version for the recipe.
To use these GUIs, you need Tcl/Tk installed on your local machine.
Try out 'jitter.tcl' or 'spjitter.tcl' to launch the GUIs.
The spectroscopy modules for ISAAC have received intensive care over
the last few months. Some recipes have been completely rewritten,
some algorithms deeply modified to increase the data quality in
output. We have been helped enormously by many users contributing
their time to contribute ideas, bug reports and recommendations to
the recipes. Let them be thanked for their invaluable support!
Last but not least, we are about to introduce the Python programming
language into eclipse, to make it easier to program your own
recipes. You can read more about that in the following page:
eclipse and Python: future evolutions of eclipse
Many thanks to all of your for your help and support.
N. Devillard -- Mon 03 Apr 2000
N. Devillard
Mon Apr 3 10:34:23 MET DST 2000