To: Phyllis Jackson From: Eric Greisen Date: "1 July 1995" Subject: Quarterly Report on AIPS (1995 Q2) By 7 July 1995, 116 copies of the 15JAN95 release of "Classic AIPS" had been shipped either over the Internet or by magnetic tape. 80 of the copies were of the full binary release, some for each of SunOS (4.x.y), Solaris (Sun), AIX (IBM), OSF/1 (DEC Alpha), Linux (PCs), IRIX (SGI) and HP-UX (Hewlett-Packard). Preparations for the 15JUL95 release are well underway. This release will be copyrighted by AUI and given away under the "GNU General Public License" via anonymous ftp. This will make it easier for potential users, in and out of astronomy, to obtain a copy of AIPS. To maintain some idea of how many sites are using AIPS and to keep some control over demands on our time for user assistance, we will keep a record of all fetches of AIPS via ftp and require sites to "register" with us before receiving assistance. In the registration process, sites will provide information about themselves and their use of AIPS which will enable us to set priorities if requests for user assistance become excessive. Commercial customers who have paid a registration fee will have their contribution rolled over into a maintenance contract for the outstanding part of their contract. We will be charging such organizations a fee for assistance in the future. The re-write of the AIPS CookBook continued during the quarter with a complete re-write of the two chapters (now combined into a single chapter) on imaging, deconvolution, and self-calibration. The new chapter emphasizes IMAGR and SCMAP and deprecates the use of older imaging tasks such as MX and HORUS. 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 new imaging task, IMAGR, was enhanced to allow images as large as 8192 pixels on a side, to allow up to 500 Clean windows per field, and to correct several minor data handling and gridding bugs. The iterative self-cal/imaging task SCMAP was enhanced by adding all of the advanced imaging features of IMAGR including the interactive TV display and windowing options. The verb FILEBOX was created to assist users in preparing long lists of Clean windows. The object-oriented software in AIPS was improved to control access to the "array processor" (large common memory area) and to provide more TV display options including wedges, labeling, and color table handling. A new task for amplitude calibration, primarily in VLBI, called APCAL was added to the system. It uses system temperature and gain curve tables produced by ANTAB to determine atmospheric opacity and other amplitude corrections which it them applies to the basic AIPS calibration SN table. The new task BLAVG averages cross-polarized data over baselines and time to enable all available data to be used for deriving R-L phase and delay differences between IFs. These differences must be found and removed in order to average cross-hand data over frequency channels and IFs. The new task FXVLB has also appeared in preparation for improvements - not yet implemented - in the amplitude decorrelation correction of VLBA data. The making of images from the "on-the-fly" observing mode of the 12m telescope was corrected by the removal an occasionally significant bug and by the addition of an option to create images of the image reliability. The latter are used with the new task WTSUM to do sums of images weighted correctly by their expected noise. A bug in the source-finding task SAD which caused it to reject too many sources was removed. The AIPS FITS writer stopped writing an excess record on empty table extension files. The AIPS TV was given four more graphics planes for line drawing in additional colors and was changed to try to reduce its impact on user terminal windows when it uses a non-default color map. Previously, TV instructions as well as other lines were often invisible in those terminal windows when the cursor was on the TV window. The AIPS scripts were changed to use Perl in places (when possible) to let them run very much faster. File: /home/primate/egreisen/AIPS/reports/QRep95b.TXT