• 2015A

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Starlink Software Collection - 2015A Release Notes

Highlights

• This is the final release funded by the Science and Technology Facilities Council. Future development will continue with the East Asian Observatory. Community contributions are welcomed.
• Improved documentation build system: hyperlinks in the pdf documents and improved styling for the html output.
• Mac OSX build has fewer dependencies, is relocatable, and no longer needs to use DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

General

• The applications KAPRH and ECHWIND have been removed in this release.

Changes to Applications

CCDPACK (ascl:1403.021)

• The ccdexercise script has been fixed.
• ccdexercise is now available to bash users.

CONVERT

• IDL routines for reading a writing NDF files now correctly locate the shared libraries in $CONVERT_DIR.
• A bug in FITS2NDF has been fixed when merging FITS WCS headers into a pre-existing WCS extension.

CUPID (ascl:1311.007)

• EXTRACTCLUMPS now has SHAPE and NCLUMPS parameters.

• A description of the FellWalker algorithm has now been published in Astronomy & Computing journal: doi:10.1016/j.ascom.2014.11.004

EXTRACTOR

• SExtractor has been updated to v2.19.5

GAIA (ascl:1403.024)

• A mask can be applied to an image even if one is NDF and the other is FITS.
• Limits in XY histogram have been improved.

• Support RegTap

• TAP tables can now be visualized.
• VOTable 1.3 now supported.
• GAIA now uses VTK 6.1 for 3D rendering.

HDSTRACE

• The width of the output can now be controlled and by default the full terminal width will be used.

HTX

• Requests for obsolete documents that are not available locally will be forwarded to ADS.

KAPPA (ascl:1403.022)

• WCSALIGN and WCSMOSAIC have a new parameter ALIGNREF.
• SETQUAL can now store a constant value in the quality array.
• COPYBAD now correctly sets the bad pixel flag.
• LOGFILE parameter added to CONFIGECHO.
• A bug has been fixed in SEGMENT when an NDF is supplied with degenerate axes.
• MSTATS is now more reliable.

ORAC-DR (ascl:1310.001)

See http://www.oracdr.org/oracdr/2015AChangeLog

POLPACK (ascl:1405.014)

• Bash users now have feature parity with csh users.

SMURF (ascl:1310.007)

• The dimmconfig.lis configuration file has been deprecated. New user-config files should not use it.
• An experimental scan synchronous noise (SSN) model has been added to the SCUBA-2 map-maker.
• TIMESORT can now handle data with differing spectral bounds.
• A new script "jsatilemoc" has been added for making coverage representations (in MOC format) of JSA tiles.
• New document: SSN/79 describes a possible approach to modifying the SCUBA-2 map-maker to use a compute cluster.
• The amount of multi-threading in makemap is reduced if doing so allows chunking to be avoided.
• More robust handling of JSA tiles that cross RA=12h or that adjoin a discontinuity in the HEALPix all-sky projection.
• The number of chunks used to make a SCUBA-2 map is now recorded in the FITS extension of the map.
• makemap can now be told to abort if chunking would be used.

SPLAT (ascl:1402.008)

STAR2HTML

• Now uses tex4ht. latex2html support has been removed.

TOPCAT (ascl:1101.010)

TOPCAT version history

Changes to Libraries

AST (ascl:1404.016)

• The astRebin and astRebinSeq family of functions now include support for arrays with char (byte) and unsigned char (unsigned byte) data types.

• The Base and Current attributes of a FrameSet may now be set using the Domain name or the index of the required Frame.

• The FITS XPH projection is now supported.

• The order of WCS axes within new FITS-WCS headers created by astWrite can now be controlled using a new attribute called FitsAxisOrder.

• New function: astAppendStringf to allow printf-style conversions in supplied text.
• The 2015 leap second has been added.

ATL

• A fix has been made to the handling of Ident attributes. This fixes the display of images created by KAPPA CHANMAP.
• Some fixes have been made to atlFrameSetSplit.

EMS

• Minor bugs have been fixed following valgrind analysis.

FIO

• A problem with end-of-file handling in gfortran has been fixed.

HDS (ascl:1502.009)

• Minor tidying to internal documentation
• Improved tests.

KAPLIBS

• The variance calculation for the SUM estimator has been fixed.
• The handling of _CHAR data types in kpg1_hsect has been fixed.
• Support was added for the new ALIGNREF parameter in WCSALIGN and WCSMOSAIC.

NDF (ascl:1411.023)

• New routine: NDF_HCOPY can be used to copy history information.

NDG

• NDG1_APPEN has been fixed to handle the presence of HDS cell specifiers being used once CONVERT has been enabled.

PAL

• Version 0.9.0 PAL included.
• New routines: palPcd, palUnpcd, palEcleq, palPolmo, palAltaz, palVers (to report version programmatically), palRefcoq, palRefv, palAtmdsp, palRef.
• Now links against ERFA instead of SOFA.
• 2015 leap second included.
• SUN/267 has been updated.

PCS

• alink and ilink have been updated to compile the main routine each time rather than using an installed object file. This change allows people to build ADAM tasks from a Starlink binary distribution even if their compiler is slightly different to the one used to do the initial build.

PSX

• PSX_WORDEXP is now better at reporting errors.

SLA (ascl:1403.025)

• The 2015 leap second has been added.

STILTS

STILTS version history

Documentation

• a Latex class for creating starlink documentation was created, and is now used for all current documentation.
• the HTML output of Starlink documentation was switched to using TeX4HT instead of latex2html. In doing so the appearance of the HTML output was changed greatly.
• some older Starlink documents that are not associated with a specific application or library were obsoleted and are no longer built by default.
• All available historical Starlink documents are now indexed and hosted by ADS. If showme is used to request an obsolete document the ADS entry will be displayed.

Mac OSX Build

• A post-build fix-up script is used to add appropriate relative paths to all shared libraries and binaries. This ensures that DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH doesn't need to be set and allows the Mac build to be installed to any location.

• The initialisation scripts ($STARLINK_DIR/etc/profile for bash and $STARLINK_DIR/etc/login & $STARLINK_DIR/etc/cshrc for tcsh) don't set DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH

• The gfortran and libjpeg shared libraries are now added into the build and shipped to users instead of being a required dependency.
• In addition, some shared libraries required by some of the perl modules are also now being shipped (libgbdm, libfontconfig, libfreetype and libpng16)
• The only remaining dependencies for users to install are XQuartz/X11 and java.

Recent Articles on Starlink software

• FellWalker -- A clump identification algorithm, Astronomy & Computing, 2015, 10, 25, doi:10.1016/j.ascom.2014.11.004

• ORAC-DR: A generic data reduction pipeline infrastructure, Astronomy & Computing, 2015, 9, 40, doi:10.1016/j.ascom.2014.10.005

• Spectroscopic analysis in the virtual observatory environment with SPLAT-VO, Astronomy & Computing, 2014, 7, 108 doi:10.1016/j.ascom.2014.06.001 arXiv:1407.1765

• Learning from 25 years of the extensible N-Dimensional Data Format, Astronomy & Computing, 2015, in press, arXiv:1410.7513

• Reimplementing the Hierarchical Data System using HDF5, Astronomy & Computing, 2015, in press, arXiv:1502.04029