Starlink Software Collection - Kaulia Release Notes

You can download Kaulia from here.

General

SCUBA-2 raw data taken since February 2011 is now compressed. Kaulia is required in order to reduce new SCUBA-2 data.

NDF2FITS and FITS2NDF can now handle FITS-WCS in the form of tables that use the -TAB algorithm code.
FITS2NDF
- A new WCSCOMP parameter controls the destination of propagated world co-ordinate information in the output NDF.
NDF2FITS
- A new USEAXIS parameter controls whether AXIS co-ordinate information can be stored in an alternate representation in the FITS headers, that may include a -TAB extension.
- Changed the default ORIGIN keyword from "Starlink Project, U.K." to "Starlink Software".

A bug in FINDCLUMPS that could cause clump models creating by the GaussClumps method to have straight edges has been fixed.

Support has been added for reading the -TAB WCS FITS format.
The display of decimal degrees can now be forced using a command-line option -force_degrees, or as a permanent choice using a startup option.
The USNO NOMAD catalogue has been added to the list of Skycat catalogues. NOMAD is a simple merge of the Hipparcos, Tycho-2, UCAC-2 and USNO-B1 catalogues.
A problem reading FITS catalogues that have radians stored as single precision values has been fixed. Previously the precision used when converting to sexagesimal and degrees wasn't sufficient and RA could be truncated at a 1/10th of a degree.

General changes:
- A new graphical style attribute called TEXTMARGIN controls the width of margins cleared around the edges of each drawn text string.
- Applications that report pixel scales (e.g. NDFTRACE, WCSFRAME) now report more representative pixel scales using the median of several locations.
MFITTREND
- Permits processing of very large datasets by dividing into manageable sections.
SHOWQUAL
- Add new QNAMES output parameter to list the attribute name associated with each QUALITY bit.
WCSALIGN
- If an input NDF has more pixel axes than the reference NDF, an attempt will now be made to align the input using the reference axes, whilst retaining the other axes.

CALCQU - a new command to create Q and U values from SCUBA-2 fast-spinning polarimeter time series data files.
MAKECUBE
- Now allows the spatial reference pixel in the output cube to be specified by the user.
- Setting TRIM=YES now modifies any user-supplied LBND/UBND values to remove borders of bad pixels.
MAKEMAP
- The loading and flatfielding of raw data on multi-core systems is now faster.
- The focal plane distortion model has been updated to cover the entire focal plane.
- A new parameter (TRIM) has been added to allow borders of blank pixels to be removed from the output map.
- A bug has been fixed so that a request to perform just one iteration (numiter=1) is honoured.

A problem saving spectra received from GAIA has been fixed. Previously when a sent spectrum was the only spectrum displayed it was not possible to save it to disk.
The "remove selected" option in the cutter toolbox now handles regions that overlap the ends of the spectrum correctly. Previously bad values were added to the ends and given poor coordinates.
A single "a" or "A" as a units string is no longer recognised as meaning "Angstrom". This follows the FITS standard where "A" is reserved for "Ampere".
The auto-colourize option when loading spectra has been enabled again.

The FitsChan class now includes support for FITS "CTYPEi" headers that use the "-TAB" algorithm code.
The graphics module interface (grf) used by AST has been extended to include two new functions that control the buffering of graphical output produced by Plot methods.
The KeyMap class has a new attribute that can be set to zero to make the handling of keys case insensitive.
The Region class has a new method that returns a set of positions covering the boundary, or volume, of a supplied Region.
Correct interpretation of CAR projection FITS headers

New KPG_TYPSZ routine (adapted from CONVERT equivalent) that returns the number of bytes for a given numeric HDS data type.
Routine KPG1_BADBX now has an extra argument that indicates how the calculated bounding box should be used.
A new graphical attribute called "TextMargin" can be used to specify the width of a margin to clear around each plotted text string.
Pixel scale determination is now more accurate.
C wrappers added for KPG1_BADBX, KPG1_GTOBJ, and KPG1_PXSCL.

Add wrapper routines around PSX_WORDEXP to allow special cases. ONE_WORDEXP_NOGLOB disables file globbing and ONE_WORDEXP_FILE correctly determines whether a file was found or not. These can replace ONE_FIND_FILE and ONE_SHELL_ECHO and are more efficient because they do not (normally) need to fork a subprocess.

The structure used to hold Provenance information has been changed. It now occupies much less disk space and is much faster to read and write. Older Starlink releases will ignore such re-structured provenance information.