A new Iraf package (“stecf”) of utilities from the ST-ECF

Richard Hook wrote on May 11, 2000

STECF -- An IRAF package of utilities developed at the Space Telescope
         European Coordinating Facility, ESO, Garching, Germany
 
Richard Hook, Jeremy Walsh, Norbert Pirzkal & Wolfram Freudling
(rhook@eso.org, jwalsh@eso.org, npirzkal@eso.org & wfreudli@eso.org)

V1.0 May 2000

We have collected together many of the astronomical applications
developed as Iraf tasks at the Space Telescope European Coordinating
Facility (ST-ECF) into an Iraf package called "stecf". This package contains
several subpackages. One contains image restoration related tasks
including a multiple channel and photometric variant of the Richardson Lucy
method (cplucy). Another includes a revised version of the Drizzle image
combination engine (v1.41) and a few supporting tasks. In addition a wholly 
new 
package ("impol") for the reduction of polarimetric imaging from HST (and
ground-based instruments) is made available for the first time. 
Software for the post-pipeline processing of HST NICMOS data, with particular 
emphasis on the association and pre-processing of images to be used for grism 
spectral extraction, and finally a general purpose grism spectral extraction 
tool ("slitless") are also included. 

The package may be down-loaded from http://www.stecf.org/software/stecf-iraf/
and it is also available from an IRAF FTP archive or mirror in the iraf/contrib
directory (files stecf-v1.0.tar.Z and stecf-v1.0.readme).

Online help is available from the same URL.

This is the first release of this package and doubtless there are some
remaining small problems although the majority of the tasks are well-tested
and have been extensively used. We aim to support these tasks and will 
endeavour to help sort out any problems. We intend to add to the package
gradually and new releases will appear from time to time. Please check the
adass-iraf-applications email list for discussion and updates.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Richard Hook, ST-ECF                 E-mail:  Richard.Hook@eso.org |
| European Southern Observatory,                                     |
| Karl-Schwarzschild-Str. 2,           Phone:   +49 89 3200-6389     |
| D-85748 Garching, Germany            FAX:     +49 89 3200-6480     |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

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Last post on May 11, 2000