Diffs from version 3.2 to 3.4

Contents

• ISAAC/SOFI support
• Other

• New command called std. It is actually a standard star database browser. The database is internally hardcoded in the program itself, it will be later offering the possibility to load a database from an external ASCII file or a URL. You can browse the stars by position, name, magnitude, etc. Have a look at std man page.
• There is new code to handle FITS files! Reading FITS keywords actually does not need all the knowledge of what can be in the FITS format. A few system calls do the job quite well to retrieve values, now the accesses are really fast. The previous code to access FITS values and change them is still there, but any routine needing only read-only access is now faster by magnitudes!
• Many bugs have been corrected in the adonis-related routines, thanks to a tremendous help effort from Eric Gendron in Observatoire de Paris/Meudon. Thanks for this help, it is most welcome!
• fitsort now knows how to align its outputs, by adding blanks to fit the sizes and make them readable for a human being. Any software that reads tables in ASCII format should still be able to cope with the outputs of fitsort. Have a look at the fitsort manual page.
• New command called peak, that is meant to supersede one day all detpeak, fwhm, and photfits commands. In one command, you can detect bright objects, compute some basic statistics (min, max, mean, median in a zone around each object), compute FWHMs, photometry (with background subtraction), and why not Strehl ratio. The command still needs some testing, do not hesitate to report bugs ASAP! Have a look at the peak manual page.
• flat now features a robust method to get rid of star signal in twilight frames. The linear fit is now rejecting outliers caused by star signals, in a very reliable fashion. Computation time has jumped from a few seconds to 15 seconds per frame (5 minutes for 20 input frames), which is still reasonable given the amount of needed computations. You can also request a flat-field fitting after dark subtraction, in which case you only need to fit a slope and not a full linear parameter set (y=ax+b). It is much faster, but of course depends on the quality of the dark you provide for subtraction. flat has an ISAAC alias: is_twflat which is the same executable with some FITS keyword handling added for the ISAAC case. Have a look at the flat manual page and the is_twflat manual page.
• There are no more verbose, debug, or memory option on any eclipse command. All of these are now set through environment variables which need to be set on your user account. See the installation procedure in the distribution to know how to set your account to work with eclipse from now on.

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