[AstroPy] TABLES/STSDAS v3.12 and STSCI_PYTHON v2.10 NOW AVAILABLE

[Warren J. Hack]

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    TABLES/STSDAS v3.12 and STSCI_PYTHON v2.10 NOW AVAILABLE

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The Science Software Branch of the Space Telescope Science Institute
wishes to announce the availability of version 3.12 of the Space
Telescope Science Data Analysis Software (STSDAS).  Concurrent with
the STSDAS release, we have also released v3.12 of the TABLES external
package. Both of these packages are layered upon IRAF as external
packages; it is therefore necessary to obtain and install IRAF
(from http://iraf.noao.edu) before installing TABLES and STSDAS.
STSDAS is linked against libraries in TABLES, so TABLES must be
installed before STSDAS.

This release of STSDAS contains changes to NICMOS, ACS, COS, and WFC3,
and the Dither packages. This release includes the same versions of
the calibration software used in the pipeline to support all active
HST instruments using the algorithms developed from the data taken
during Servicing Mission 4, especially for the new instruments Wide
Field Camera 3(WFC3) and the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph(COS).

In addition, we are now including the code used by the Space
Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) to do the final
reprocessing of the FOS data that now resides in the HST archives.
This package, STPOA, along with the last stand-alone version of the
FOS package in HST_CALIB, are being provided purely for documentation
of the algorithms used in generating the calibrated data in the
archives. The code in the STPOA package is not expected to be usable
for processing FOS data anymore, however, it remains a useful resource
for understanding how the archived FOS data was calibrated.

STSDAS also includes some Python-based tasks; running these requires
the STScI Python Libraries to be installed (all the non-Python tasks
can be used in the traditional way and do not require Python or
the STScI Python libraries). These tasks can only be run from PyRAF
using standard IRAF CL task syntax, or within Python scripts using
Python syntax.

The Science Software Branch of STScI also wishes to announce the
availability of version 2.10 of STSCI_PYTHON.  STScI_Python is a collection
of Python modules, packages and C extensions that has been developed to
provide a general astronomical data analysis infrastructure. They can
be used for Python tasks that are accessible from within STSDAS when
running under PyRAF or standalone from within Python.

All tasks in this release of STScI_Python rely on the use of numpy
for array operations. All references to numarray and Numeric have been
removed from the code, with support no longer being provided for use of
numarray or Numeric.

The primary testing for this release took place under Python 2.5.4
using numpy 1.4.  This release also represents the first step in our
efforts to prepare our code for eventual conversion to Python 3.0.
All the code in this release was  updated to use the division
library which will be standard for Python 3.0 through the use of
'from __future__ import division'. This code was then tested under
Python 2.6 to insure that all the results are identical to those
obtained under Python 2.5.4.

This distribution continues to develop packages with tasks specific to
each HST instrument, with updates being made to code for WFPC2 and
COS.  This release also contains an updated version of Multidrizzle
and PyDrizzle as used by the HST ACS and WFC3 pipelines, along with
significantly updated versions of PyFITS and PyRAF.  Use of the Python
tasks requires upgrading to this version of STSCI_PYTHON.

The updated version of PyRAF included in this release can now be run
in a "No-IRAF" mode, where the Python shell will run and - although no
IRAF tasks will be found - the basic capabilities of the PyRAF command-line
will still be supported.  The release notes contain more specific 
information
about what still works under PyRAF without IRAF.

Finally, this release also includes a new package, STWCS, an HST
instrument specific library which provides detector to world coordinate
transformations using all distortion model information available
through the WCS keywords.


No More support for numarray
============================
Numarray is no longer used by tasks within STScI_Python. You are advised
to migrate to numpy to use this release, as no further support will be
provided for the use of numarray.

Information on making the switch to numpy from numarray can
be found in this document:

http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/numarray/numarray2numpy.pdf

Platform Support
================
This release does not contain STSDAS/Tables binaries for PowerPC
Macintosh systems. However, there are no known reasons why a user
could not build this package from source code on a PowerPC using the
installation instructions for STSDAS.

STSDAS/Tables Binaries for this release were built on Red Hat
Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Solaris 5.8, and Mac OS X 10.5 (Intel architecture
only).

STSDAS/Tables Binaries were built with IRAF 2.14, except for
Solaris, which were built with IRAF 2.12.2a.  IRAF is available from
http://iraf.net.

In addition, this distribution of STScI_Python was tested to correctly
support installation on Linux, Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), and Solaris,
while also being provided for installation (without IRAF) under
Windows.


STSCI_Python on WINDOWS
=======================
This release includes a port of stsci_python that runs natively under
Windows. PyRAF is not included for use with the Windows distribution,
but the source distribution for STScI_Python could potentially be
installed under Cygwin to work with the IRAF installation there,
although that configuration has not been verified or tested.

The primary requirement for use of this installer is that the Windows
executables were built against and, therefore, can run only under
Python 2.5.


WHERE TO OBTAIN THIS SOFTWARE
=============================
STSDAS/TABLES v3.12 can be downloaded from the STSDAS web site

http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/stsdas/download

Installation instructions are available on the web site. Precompiled
binaries also exist for some of the ports supported by NOAO, including
Sun Solaris, RedHat Linux and Mac OS X.

STSCI_PYTHON v 2.10 be downloaded from the PyRAF web site

http://www.stsci.edu/resources/software_hardware/pyraf/stsci_python/current/download

Installation instructions are available from the PyRAF web site, with
support for installations on Sun Solaris, RedHat Linux, Mac OS X,
and Windows.

Please contact us through e-mail (help at stsci.edu), by telephone at
(410) 338-1082.

-- 
Science Software Branch
Space Telescope Science Institute
3700 San Martin Drive
Baltimore MD, 21218
(410) 338-1082