This command starts the CCDPACK reduction GUI.

The GUI is specifically designed to help the inexperienced or occasional reducer of CCD data (although others will also find it of use). These aims are meet by providing an easy to use, X based, graphical interface that features contextual help and that limits options to those of immediate relevance. It concentrates on data organization and the definition of any CCD characteristics rather than on the nature and control of the core CCDPACK reduction programs.

The reduction of the actual data is separate to the GUI and uses the automated scheduling facilities of CCDPACK.

Unknown detectors. If you do develop an import table or restoration (setup) file for a telescope/detector pass these on to the maintainer of this package, together with a description. They will be distributed in future releases for the benefit of others.

The interface can be configured by controlling the values of various CCDxxxxx global variables. These can be set in either a global configuration file called ".ccdpack" which should be placed in the $HOME directory, or by loading as part of a state from a local ".ccdpack" file. The names and functions of the more significant configurations follows.

• CCDbrowser, the name of the WWW browser used to show hypertext help. This may only be Mosaic or netscape (or whatever the names of these browsers are on your system) and should be the full path names if they are not located on your PATH.

  This option can also be set using the environment variable HTX_BROWSER.

  The default is [Mm]osiac followed by [Nn]etscape.

• CCDstarhtml, the top directories that contains the Starlink HTML documents (in particular sun139 and ccdpack hypertext help). This defaults to
  $CCDPACK_DIR/../../docs:$CCDPACK_DIR/../../help.

• CCDprefs, this is an array of values that define widget preferences such as the colour scheme and the reliefs etc. The more interesting elements are:

  • (priority), this defines the priority of the preferences. If you want to override colours and fonts etc. from your .Xdefaults then set this value to widgetDefault. The normal value is userDefault as I think it looks nice the way it is.

  • (font_size), this is set to 12 or 14. Normally this is set to 14 if your display has more than 800 pixels in both dimensions.

  • (scheme_colour), this controls the scheme of colours used by the interface. XREDUCE has its own scheme but you override this by setting this to a new colour for the background, the other colours will be derived from this. For finer control see the palette.tcl script in the Tcl distribution.

  • (click_for_focus), this controls how the focus moves between the various widgets. If you set this to 0 (false), then the focus follows the cursor position.

• CCDdetectorcache, the directory that contains the known detector setups and import tables. Defaults to CCDPACK_DIR. If the variable CCDPACK_CONFIG is set this directory is also used.

An example configuration file follows:

This sets the default browser to netscape, allows your .Xdefaults to override any internal preferences, makes the focus follow the mouse and defines a local directory that contains setups and import tables.

“Using the CCDPACK data reduction GUI”, REDUCE.