Starlink Software Collection - 2015B Release Notes

Highlights

• Support for the 2015 July leap second is fully included (the previous release will not correctly grid JCMT data taken after June 2015).

General

Changes to Applications

CONVERT

• fix for FITS airlock propogation when WCS is in the airlock (used by WFCAM)

EXTRACTOR

• (submodule): fix handling of END cards in the NDF extension

FIGARO

• use IAU/FITS standard units strings

GAIA (ascl:1403.024)

• add URAT1 catalogue, deeper than UCAC4
• match SExtractor changes in output format
• don't fail when printing image ramp for extremely large data ramp
• centroiding correctly shown as disabled in optimal photometry tolobox.

KAPPA (ascl:1403.022)

• normalize can now store the calculated slopes and offsets in a pair of output NDFs.

• normalize now calculates the correlation coefficient of the two input data sets.

• rotate now stores the used rotation angle within an output parameter.

• New command ndfcompare compares two NDFs for significant differences. This includes shape, data values, variances, quality, WCS, etc.

• A bug has been fixed in beamfit that caused incorrect results when used to process maps from the JCMT Science Archive.

ORAC-DR (ascl:1310.001)

POLPACK (ascl:1405.014)

• The polrotrefr command no longer has an ANGLE parameter. Instead, the new reference direction is specified as being parallel to a specified axis of a specified coordinate-system.

SMURF (ascl:1310.007)

• Many changes and additions have been made to support processing of POL2 data. However, POL2 is still in a commissioning phase and so POL2-related software should be considered unstable.

• A bug has been fixed in skyloop that caused any supplied fake-map to be added into the data multiple times (once for each iteration).

• The iterative section of the map-maker can now remove correlated backgrounds from the time-stream data using a PCA (Principal Component Analysis) model instead of the usual COM (common-mode) model. Previously use of PCA was limited to the cleaning phase prior to the iterative section.
• More of the PCA code is now multi-threaded and so is much faster.

• A new commmand called sc2compare has been added that will compare two SCUBA-2 maps for any significant differences. This includes changes in shape, WCS, data values, variances, quality, ancillary metadata, etc.

SPLAT (ascl:1402.008)

• The previously deprecated PLASTIC VO interoperability has now been removed.
• A new command-line option "--interop none" has been added to stop any attempt to communicate with any running SAMP hubs.

TOPCAT (ascl:1101.010)

Changes to Libraries

ARY

• fixes bug occurring with non-overlapping sections.

AST (ascl:1404.016)

• Improved choice of tick-mark gaps for graphical time axes.
• The FITS "XPH" (polar HEALPix) projection is now supported.

• The SkyFrame class has a new attribute called SkyTol, which specifies the smallest significant distance within the SkyFrame. It is used to determine when two SkyFrames can be considered equivalent, thus simplifying the Mapping between them.

• A new method called astRegionOutline has been added to the Plot class. It draws the outline of a supplied AST Region.

• Plus many other more minor changes - see the AST release notes for a full list.

ATL

• atlFrameSetSplit: search other frames if current frame doesn't match

HDS (ascl:1502.009)

• Fix issues caused by accessing sections that contain more than 2^32 pixels.

KAPLIBS

• Fix bug that causes wrong section of CAR projections to be displayed
• Permit trailing END header to be written by FITSMOD
• add C wrapper for kpg1_asmrg.f
• add double precision Gaussian random number generator.

NDF (ascl:1411.023)

• Take account of the limited precision of _REAL valued AXIS arrays within WCS FrameSets.

• Improved handling of NDF sections specified by WCS values in cases where the WCS axes are at 45 degrees to the pixel axes.

NDG

• Improved wording of error messages when recording of NDF group contents fails.

PAR

• initialise returned values

Miscellaneous Perl modules?

perl-JAC-Setup perl-JCMT-MapArea perl-JCMT-Tau perl-JSA perl-Starlink-Autosastrom perl-UKIRT-Archive

Skycat

STILTS

VTK

• build only the used components of vtk

Documentation

• SC/20

Recent Articles on Starlink software

• Automated reduction of sub-millimetre single-dish heterodyne data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope using ORAC-DR, Jenness et al., MNRAS, 453, 73, doi:10.1093/mnras/stv1545