Starlink Software Collection — 2016A Release Notes

Highlights

Support for the 2016 December leap second is included (the previous release will not correctly grid JCMT data taken after December 2016).
csh is no longer required to run various applications (including SMURF's makemap command).

Fixed bug in the GaussClumps algorithm which could cause bright clear clumps to be missed.
The message printed when using the GaussClumps algorithm and one or more clumps are rejected is less misleading than it was before.

Added scroll bars around 3D toolbox spectral properties tab.
Added the Gaia Satellite all source catalogue to the standard lists (other variants are available as VO downloads).

Added new WCSADD MAPTYPE "refndf" to copy a frame from another NDF.
Added new APERADD parameter MASK which can be used to save an NDF containing a mask showing which pixels were included in the aperture.
Added new command ALIGN2D to align 2D images by minimizing the residuals between them.
Added new NORMALIZE parameters DRAWMARK and DRAWWIDTH to control plotting of these elements.
Improved MFITTREND's handling of line forests, adding new parameters FOREST and HNUMBIN.
Fixed bug preventing excess WCS axes being removed by NDFCOPY.

Catalogue rows that contain any Starlink bad values are no longer passed to the GAIA polarimetry toolbox.
Fixed bug that caused an ellipsis to be appended to the end of the key title created by POLPLOT, if the Title attribute was set in the key style.
POLVEC has a new parameter called REFUPDATE that controls the reference direction used by the output catalogue.
Fixed bug in the calculation of the error values in the output catalogue created by POLVEC. Errors may now be generally some what smaller than before.

Options for despiking of JCMT WVM data added.
FTS2SPLIT now generates output file names by appending a number rather than manipulating the subscan field of the name.
Added new MAKEMAP dimmconfig parameter flt.ring_mask to control the flagging of samples that suffer from ringing.
MAKEMAP now records total exposure time in the output map, using a FITS header called ELAPTIME.
Two sets of pointing corrections can now be used in MAKEMAP.
Prevented an error being shown when FIT1D parameter PARCOMP is null.
Apply map-based despiking to all subarrays other than just the first supplied.
Many changes have been made, and continue to be made, to the commands used for POL-2 data reduction. You are advised to download the nightly build from EAO if you intend to reduce POL-2 data.
Fixed bug in extinction calculation that could cause very small random errors in extinction values.

The AST source code is now stored in its own GitHub repository, separate to the main Starlink repository.
The new configure option "--without-fortran" allows AST to be built without a Fortran compiler being available.
Mapping attributes that could previously be changed freely can now only be changed if the mapping has not been cloned or incorporated into another AST object.
A new Mapping class — UnitNormMap — has been added, which converts an absolute position vector into a unit vector relative to a specified origin, plus a vector length.
Include December 2016 leap second.
Fix memory corruption caused by more than 50 calls to astMapPutElemC
Change angular constants in AST_PAR include file from single to double precision.
Fix bug in astGetRegionBounds that could cause incorrect bounds to be returned for cases where the region crosses a longitude=zero singularity.
New Frame method, astAxNorm, to normalise a set of axis values.

Prevented insufficient good data in a element from being fatal when using ESTIMATOR=Mode in COLLAPSE.