Planned IRAF V2.12 Release Highlights

The following is a summary of the major revisions in the upcoming IRAF V2.12 release, a full revisions notes description (including parameter and task changes) will be available with the final distribution. Preparation for the V2.12 release has already begun and the system will be frozen shortly after the ADASS XI meeting for beta testing and while the final distributions are being built. The X11IRAF V1.3 release will be coincident with that of IRAF V2.12.

UPDATE: (April 16, 2002) We apologize for the delays in the V2.12 release and the inconvenience this may have caused in your scheduling. We have had no hard drivers for the release date and wanted to allow plenty of time for beta testing and platform upgrades - it is more efficient for us to release for all the major platforms simultaneously, schedule permitting. The Beta system has been stable for a couple of weeks now and the public release will go forward as soon as we wrap up the remaining platform support work. The MacOSX port has generated a great deal of interest and will be supported in V2.12, and you can be sure the release will be very visible on our web page and in the iraf-announce mail exploder when the public release occurs.

IRAF Revisions

    Highlights

	Enhanced pixel mask support.  FITS kernel support for pixel mask
	    images.  System library support for integrating pixel masks
	    into applications in a consistent way.  Addition of pixel
	    mask support to selected IMAGES applications (widespread
	    integration of masks throughout IRAF will follow in a later
	    release).
	Major new version of Ximtool with full IRAF support (see below).
	Platform support upgrades: new port to MacOS X; Solaris, Linux
	    upgrades

    New Applications Software

        ASTCAT 	    	Remote astrometric catalog access package
        CRUTIL 	    	Cosmic ray detection and removal utilities package
        QUADRED 	Quad-readout CCD reduction package

        CCGET 	    	Extract objects from a text file catalog
        CCSTD 	    	Transform to and from standard astrometric coordinates
        MIMSTATISTICS   IMSTATISTICS through an image mask
        MSKEXPR   	Compute an image pixel mask from an expression
        RSKYSUB 	Running mean/median sky subtraction task

    New Developer Libraries

        CATQUERY 	Remote astrometric/photometric catalog access library
        PSTOOLS 	Postscript text generation library
        SKYWCS 		Sky coordinate transformation library

    Miscellaneous Updates

        HELP task has GUI browser and HTML/Postscript output options
        DISPLAY and IMEXAMINE tasks now support multiple WCS and up to
	    16 display frames
        New error-detecting installation script
        System diagnostic script (SYSINFO)
        Significant updates to the IMCOMBINE task and DIGIPHOT package