August 2011
This release of STSDAS contains changes to the pipeline code for nearly
all the instruments (STIS, NICMOS, WFC3 and COS). In addition,
the final software used by the ST-ECF to calibrate FOS data has been
included strictly as a record of the processing performed to generate
the FOS products available from the HST archive.
The specific changes are detailed in the following sections.
Platform Support
================
Binaries for this release were built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and
5 and Mac OS X 10.4 (PPC and Intel architecture). Binaries were built
with IRAF 2.14.
IRAF is available separately from http://iraf.net.
No Solaris Support
------------------
This release has NOT been tested on the Solaris platform. We no longer
build Solaris binaries for STSDAS, although the source code can always
be downloaded and compiled locally as needed.
64-bit IRAF Support
--------------------
IRAF 2.15 includes support for 64-bit systems. The changes necessary to
support 64-bits generally require applications to be modified. We will
only release 32-bit binaries of the Tables and STSDAS packages for use
with IRAF 2.15. Support for 32-bit binaries will continue as long as
there are sufficient platforms that such binaries will run on. We may
only convert some packages in Tables and STSDAS to 64-bit version when
the 32-bit versions are no longer viable and if created will be released
as a separate package with a different name. When the 32-bit versions
of TABLES and STSDAS are no longer viable, support for any tasks within
those packages not ported to 64-bits will end. The full description of
this policy can be found online at:
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/stsdas/iraf64
STECF Software
==============
This release also contains the latest version of the stecf IRAF package for
supporting HST data that had been developed by members of the Space
Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) which closed on 31
December 2010.
The packages included in stecf are:
imres - Tasks used for photometric image restoration with unconstrained star
positions, simulating images with ground-based seeing and making
apodizing mask images.
impol - A package for imaging linear polarization mapping for data taken
using the polarimetry modes of HST instruments. An overview and
access to demos and help files is available at:
http://www.eso.org/~jwalsh/softpol/
specres - A package for point source extraction and background decomposition
of 2-D (longslit) spectra. An overview is provided at:
http://www.eso.org/~jwalsh/specres/
Support for these packages may be obtained by contacting the STScI Help
Desk at 'help@stsci.edu'. These questions will then be forwarded to the
package authors at ESO as required.
HST_CALIB
=========
WFC3
====
The WFC3 calwf3 task has been updated to version 2.4, which includes
the following change:
- The logic used to execute the wf3ccd, wf3rej, and wf32d series
of sub-tasks for associations of UVIS exposures has been updated
to properly handle cases where wf3rej is skipped due to the number
of input images exceeding its current limit of 120. In this case,
wf32d processing will be skipped for the (non-existent) wf3rej
product, while wf32d processing will be applied to all of the
individual input exposures if EXPSCORR=PERFORM.
Note that calwf3 v2.3 was released in STSDAS v3.13 patch release 1 in
April 2011, which contained an important correction for processing
of IR subarray exposures. For more details, see the calwf3 release
notes page at
http://www.stsci.edu/hst/wfc3/pipeline/CALWF3ReleaseNotes.html
STIS
====
CALSTIS Version 2.36 (27-May-2011) has been updated for this release.
The changes include:
- Improve the a4corr correction for echelle wavecal processing
in calstis.
- fixed the bug that caused CALSTIS to crash when an imset was
missing due to having an exposure time of 0.
- a new command-line option -bn was added that turns off ('n'
for none) background smoothing, an option that gets turned on when
'bksmode="off"'.
mkfringeflat
------------
- A problem running mkfringeflat under pyraf on image sections was fixed.
ctestis
-------
- This task was modified to add a new column to the output table
that lists the correction to the measured Y centroid of a
star due to distortions of the PSF caused by CTE trails on the
STIS CCD.
HSTCOS
=======
CALCOS has been updated to CALCOS Version 2.15.4. Changes were only
made to the Python code itself found in the STScI_Python release,
while no changes were implemented in the IRAF interface to that code
found in this package. This version includes:
- A 'walk' correction was added to CALCOS to correct the pixel
coordinates of events in an FUV TIME-TAG exposure for shifts
which are dependent on the pulse height amplitude (PHA).
- Use exposure appropriate for each FUV data segment in the x1d
correction.
- A bug in background smoothing during spectral extraction has
been fixed. This mostly affects values near the endpoints of
the spectrum.
NICMOS
======
No changes were implemented in this package.
ACS
======
CALACS Version 5.2.1 (11-Feb-2011) contains several updates to better
support post-SM4 data and to calibrate CR-SPLIT and NREPEAT > 1 CCD
data the same. These changes include:
- All CCD data taken as either CR-SPLIT or REPEAT-OBS associations
will be calibrated and combined as CR-SPLIT data. This will eliminate
the generation of _sfl.fits files for ALL ACS CCD data in the pipeline
and only produce _crj.fits files (along with the currently generated
_flt.fits files for each input exposure). This change will NOT affect
how ACS/SBC (MAMA) data gets processed, only ACS CCD observations.
- The logic implemented in CALACS to correctly propogate the
cosmic-ray DQ flags to the final FLT images was fixed.
- The initialization of the ERR array values for ACS (post-SM4) did
not match the expected ERR values given the inputs provided by the
reference files. CALACS was refactored to perform BLEVCORR prior to
doNoise, then changed to not use the bias value in initializing the
ERR array values.
aXe
======
Updates for aXe v2.3 include:
- Fixed a bug in "drzprep" that was causing 2-d stamp images to
have the wrong size (too short in the x/dispersion direction)
when setting DRZRESOLA in the .config file to a value smaller
than the physical pixel size, in order to oversample the
drizzled image.
- Fixed a bug in "drzprep" that was causing the estimated errors
for spectra extracted from sub-sampled 2-d images with axedrizzle
to be too high by about a factor of 6.
- Modified the behavior of "axeprep" so that it no longer quits
with an error when encountering an object in the input object
list (IOL) with mag=99, which occurs when SExtractor can't
compute a magnitude for an object. It will now just issue a
warning and continue with processing. Entries for these objects
will be ignored in later processing steps based on the setting
of MMAG_EXTRACT.
- Calls to most IRAF tasks within the axeprep, fcubeobjs, and
drizzleobjects tasks have been replaced with equivalent Python,
PyFITS, and numpy procedures.
- Fixed a bug that caused "axedrizzle" to crash when users had
a very long directory path for the input and output files.
- Updated aXe use of "Raise" when reporting error conditions to
make them consistent with Python 2.7 usage of Exceptions.
- Fixed potential divide-by-zero errors in several tasks.
IMGTOOLS
========
Updates were made to 'improject' to use the correct function for
getting an image section when the image data is double precision.
