IRAF
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IRAF (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility) is a collection of software written at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) geared towards the reduction of astronomical images and spectra in pixel array form. This is primarily data taken from imaging array detectors such as CCDs. It is available for all major operating systems for mainframes and desktop computers. IRAF was designed cross-platform, supporting VMS and UNIX-like operating systems. Use on Microsoft Windows was made possible by Cygwin in earlier versions, and can be today done with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Today, it is primarily used on macOS and Linux. IRAF commands (known as tasks) are organized into package structures. Additional packages may be added to IRAF. Packages may contain other packages. There are many packages available by NOAO and external developers often focusing on a particular branch of research or facility. Functionality available in IRAF includes the calibration of the fluxes and positions of astronomical objects within an image, compensation for sensitivity variations between detector pixels, combination of multiple images or measurement of the redshifts of absorption or emission lines in a spectrum. While IRAF is still very popular among astronomers, institutional development and maintenance was stopped. IRAF is now maintained as community software.
IRAF (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility) is a collection of software written at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) geared towards the reduction of astronomical images and spectra in pixel array form. This is primarily data taken from imaging array detectors such as CCDs. It is available for all major operating systems for mainframes and desktop computers. IRAF was designed cross-platform, supporting VMS and UNIX-like operating systems. Use on Microsoft Windows was made possible by Cygwin in earlier versions, and can be today done with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Today, it is primarily used on macOS and Linux. IRAF commands (known as tasks) are organized into package structures. Additional packages may be added to IRAF. Packages may contain other packages. There are many packages available by NOAO and external developers often focusing on a particular branch of research or facility. Functionality available in IRAF includes the calibration of the fluxes and positions of astronomical objects within an image, compensation for sensitivity variations between detector pixels, combination of multiple images or measurement of the redshifts of absorption or emission lines in a spectrum. While IRAF is still very popular among astronomers, institutional development and maintenance was stopped. IRAF is now maintained as community software. { print(' Hello, world !! ') } CL scripts have usually the suffix .cl , which may cause conflicts with Common Lisp code files. task hello # CL callable task procedure hello() # common procedure begin call printf ("hello, world\n") end SPP programs have usually the suffix .x , those which need to be preprocessed with the generic tool have .gx .
Supplementary software
A full IRAF working environment usually requires two other applications: an extended xterm window with a graphics windows (called xgterm and distributed in a separate x11iraf package) and an image display program referred to as an "image server". The two most popular image servers are SAOImageDS9 (by SAO) and ximtool (NOAO, also distributed in the x11iraf package). As an alternative of xgterm and the Command Language, the Python package PyRAF can be used. PyRAF is able to translate CL scripts into Python scripts. It also provides a graphics window (based on Tk or on Matplotlib). As command shell, either the Python or IPython command shell can be used, or a special mode resembling much of the look and feel of the CL command shell.
References
External links
IRAF Homepage IRAF documentation Source code repository on Github IRAF community discussion page Old IRAF home page on webarchive
Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1377967808 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.