Starlink Software Collection - Nanahope Release Notes

These are notes for the pre-release of Nanahope. As modifications are made to the development tree the changes are listed here. During the release the release branch will be created and this document will be released.

General Changes

New Applications

Changes to Applications

CUPID

• The ILEVEL message level interface has been modified to match the MERS standard. Symbolic names can now be used in addition to integers. ALL will show all messages and NONE will disable all message output.

KAPPA

• BEAMFIT increased the precision of the formatted values stored in CENTRE and REFOFF output parameters.
• CLINPLOT can now plot the data in a variety of ways, including markers and the histogram style.
• FITSMOD There is a new editing option "Null" that nullify the value of the chosen keyword, i.e. makes it undefined, by substituting spaces for its value.
• HISCOM has a new parameter called DATE. It allows the date and time of the new history record to be set explicitly rather than to the default current time. There is a choice of formats including Gregorian Date and Time, and Julian Date.
• NDFCOPY has a new parameter called LIKEWCS. This allows the shape of the template NDF in the WCS Frame to be used to determine the bounds of the output NDF.
• Bug Fixes:
  • BEAMFIT formerly generated erroneous second-axis values of the CENTRE output parameter.
  • CENTROID formerly failed for data with backgrounds less approximately dex-10.

SMURF

• SCUBA-2 darks are now interpolated
• SCUBA-2 processing now accepts bad pixel masks

GAIA

• The mean angles reported by the select positions toolbox are now normalised as position angles. Previously they were just the arithmetic mean.
• New options in the spectral extraction window now forces the X and Y coordinates to be positive. This is useful when drawing the with log scaling.
• Several problems when determining the min/max values and percentile cuts displayed in the main window have been fixed.
• A bug in the pick object toolbox has been fixed. Previously if you opted for RA and Dec in degrees this setting would be ignored when zooming.
• Many changes to the XY profile toolbox have been made. This now displays the position along the X and Y axes (previously an offset was shown), along with the value and position of the peaks and the coordinate ranges of each profile. It is also possible to display the peak values using lines drawn in the profiles and on the main image.
• The blank pixel colour is now preserved when new colour tables are loaded.
• Time-series spectra extracted from cubes can now be displayed showing the elapsed time from the first observation.
• The coordinate system used when handling a cube can now be changed to display pixel and grid coordinates, as well as spectral ones.
• A new command-line option -rtd_autocut has been added. This applies the -default_cut percentile to any images received by the realtime interface.
• Catalogue windows now transform their positions from the given equinox to the equinox of the image before plotting marker symbols. For instance this means you can now query for catalogue positions in J2000 and plot over an image set to B1950 and vice versa.
• The contour toolbox now detects cubes displayed in other windows and will step through the slices of the cube contouring each in turn over the displayed image. See the help in the contour toolbox for how to use this.
• A bug in the operation of the patch toolbox has been fixed. Previously GAIA could crash when using very small detached sky regions.
• A bug in the handling of temporary images created by the regions toolbox has been fixed. Previously if more than one instance of this toolbox was in use the names of the temporary files could clash.

SPLAT

• When displaying dual sideband spectra, line identifiers can now be drawn for both sidebands, not just the current one.
• Series of spectra displayed in a single plot can now be offset from each other using artificial baselines for easier inspections. The ordering of the offsets can be determined by evaluating an expression based on the FITS card values in the spectra. This can include the evaluation of dates and times.
• The VO registry interface has been updated to use version 1 access. Note that any existing saved lists of SSAP registries will no longer be compatible and must be regenerated.
• A bug calculating UTC from TDB for the epoch of observation in the JAC synopsis has been fixed.
• A new toolbox for applying offsets to spectra displayed in the same window has been added. This allows the spectra to be displayed stacked above each other by a fixed amount. The spectra can be ordered using the transformation of a FITS value, so that the shift can be applied in, say, date order.
• The filter box has been changed so that rebin is now the default option.
• A new menu item for removing all line identifiers from a plot has been added.
• A fuller description of the items shown in the JAC plot synopsis has been added to SUN/243.
• The colours that are automatically selected for spectra will no longer include shades of yellow. These tend to be indistinctive on a white background.
• The properties used for rendering the current spectrum (line style, width colour etc.) can now be saved as the default properties and will persist between sessions. Note that the colour of the spectrum will not be re-used unless you have switched off automatically colouring.

Changes to Libraries

MERS

• Now thread-safe

• C interface no longer includes the fortran msgFmt<x> routines. Instead a single C routine is provided for sprintf style formatting (msgFmt).

• New function msgBlankif. This is a version of msgBlank that can be output conditionally similar to msgOut vs msgOutif.
• C interface for messaging level now uses a special type (msglev_t) rather than simple int.
• errRepf, msgOutiff and msgOutf: new routines supporting sprintf-style formatting in addition to token replacement. %KEYWORD expansion disabled. $PARAM expansion unaffected. (C interface only)
• Can now be used in a threaded application so long as msgTune and errTune are only called before multiple threads are created.
• New function msgFlusherr can be used to flush error messages using MSG instead of ERR.

• MSG filter levels extended to include MSGDEBUG1 to MSGDEBUG20. This should allow more fine grained control of debugging messages.

• The filter level can now also be set to MSGNONE (no messages at all) and MSGALL (every message) but these can not be used in msgOutif calls. This allows all messages to be silenced or all messages to be displayed.

• msgIfget can now understand parameters that have an integer value as well as parameters containing the level string. This is to allow the KAPPA ILEVEL scheme to coexist.
• New function msgFlevok() can be used to compare the supplied filter level with the internal value. A simple wrapper around msgIflev.