To:      Phyllis Jackson

From:    Eric Greisen

Date:    "1 October 1994"

Subject: Quarterly Report on AIPS (1994 Q3)

     By 3 October 1994, the 15JUL94 release of "Classic AIPS" had been
shipped to 46 institutions, 27 by magnetic tape and 18 by electronic
copies.  The increase in the use of magnetic tape has been caused by
our offer to shorten the installation process by sending a full binary
copy of AIPS on tape.  The binary versions are currently available for
SunOS, Solaris (Sun), AIX (IBM), OSF/1 (DEC Alpha), and Linux (PCs)
systems, with an SGI version expected soon.  The AIPS programming
group in Socorro will be reduced by the transfer of Phil Diamond to
the aips++ project in January 1995.

     The substantial work of rewriting the user manual called the
"AIPS CookBook" continued during the quarter.  New chapters treating
introduction to AIPS, basic tools, calibration, program lists, and the
use of NRAO facilities were completed for the 15JUL94 release.
In addition, completely rewritten chapters on spectral-line and
VLBI/VLBA reductions are under active preparation at this time.
All chapters of the CookBook are made available via the World Wide
Web.  Users can fetch the new chapters as they are actually completed
by fetching the files via the WWW (or via anonymous ftp).

     During the quarter, nine new tasks were added to Classic AIPS.
Two of these represent major advances in VLBI data processing, one to
calibrate polarization and the other to do fringe-rate mapping, both
for spectral-line VLBI data.  Two more of these represent a major
enhancement in the processing of single-dish data in Classic AIPS, one
to read in "on-the-fly" data from the 12-meter telescope and the other
to select, project, sort, and grid single-dish imaging data.  Numerous
fixes were made throughout the code as well to make it more robust for
single-dish data.  The other new tasks subtract baselines from
autocorrelation spectra, clip images, re-grid Digitized Sky Survey
(STScI) images to standard coordinates, convert between model-fit and
"stars" extension files, and plot convolution functions and their FFT
or expected noise.

     Pre-existing tasks also received significant attention.  The most
complex change involved fixing bandpass calibration for the
time-dependent shifts in bandpass introduced by the VLBA correlator.
The VLBA data reading task was enhanced to correct total-power spectra
for defects introduced by the FFT.  UV data flagging was extended to
single-source and compressed-format files and a flagging option was
added to one of the spectral baseline (continuum) removal tasks.
Routines to copy tables taking into account data selection parameters
were added and a bug in the stabilization of self-calibration was
corrected.  The handling and computation of holography data was
improved and several bugs affecting byte-swapped computers (e.g., DEC
Alphas) were exterminated.


File: /home/primate/egreisen/AIPS/reports/QRep94c.TXT