To:      Phyllis Jackson

From:    Eric Greisen

Date:    "1 April 1995"

Subject: Quarterly Report on AIPS (1995 Q1)

     By 21 March 1995, the 15JAN95 release of "Classic AIPS" had been
shipped to 73 institutions, 34 by magnetic tape and 39 by electronic
copies.  With this release, we offer a full binary copy of AIPS on
tape and over the Internet.  The full binary version was shipped on
28 of the magnetic tapes and 14 of the electronic copies.  The binary
versions are currently available for SunOS, Solaris (Sun), AIX (IBM),
OSF/1 (DEC Alpha), Linux (PCs), SGI and Hewlett-Packard (HP-UX).  At
the end of this quarter, Phil Diamond left the AIPS group in Socorro
to help manage the VLBA project.  This leaves a serious hole in our
manpower and expertise for developing VLBA-related software.

     The re-write of the AIPS CookBook continued at a slower pace
during the quarter.  A new VLBI data reduction chapter was completed
and changes to the imaging and analysis chapters were begun.  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).

     The most significant change in AIPS during the quarter was the
release of the new imaging task IMAGR.  Using the object-oriented
software package in AIPS, this task implements a wide range of data
weighting options including Dan Briggs' "robust weighting" scheme to
temper the effects of uniform weighting.  IMAGR also uses improved
gridding and gridded model subtraction routines and uses a new
interactive TV display option.  The latter is done with a menu
approach allowing the user to view all fields being imaged with
enhancements as needed and to reset the Clean boxes/circles of each
field interactively.  IMAGR implements all of the wide-field,
wide-bandwidth options of WFCLN as well.  It is intended to replace
all previous imaging tasks except SCMAP (which will get many of these
enhancements during the next quarter).

     The package of VLB-related software also received numerous
corrections and enhancements.  A new task was written to use
auto-correlation data to estimate corrections to cross-correlation
spectra due to errors in sampler thresholds.  Another new task was
written to convert external amplitude calibration text files to
entries in AIPS calibration tables.  The VLBA-data reading task
(FITLD) was given new powers to correct the data for a variety of
"digital" correlator effects.  The tasks to fit for multi-band delays
and to convert to the Haystack fringe-fit format (allowing use of the
Goddard CALC/SOLVE package) were improved.

    In addition to the new OOP TV object, many of the display tasks
were improved.  In particular, the multi-panel contour task (KNTR) was
given the ability to display a grey-scale image or cube as well.  The
polarization display task PCNTR was given the ability to convert Q
and U polarizations on the fly and all display tasks now allow the
user to control the type and degree of labeling.  The difficulty of
removing all bugs in code was illustrated by the discovery of a
non-trivial bug in one of the oldest and most basic disk I/O routines.
The bug was not stimulated by "normal" usage, but the needs of OOP
code did bring it out.  Basic bugs in the POPS compiler and in the
VLA-data reading task were also repaired.


File: /home/primate/egreisen/AIPS/reports/QRep95a.TXT