What is AIPS?

This document was most recently updated at $Date: 2022/02/18 21:25:08 $ (UT).

The Astronomical Image Processing System is a software package for calibration, data analysis, image display, plotting, and a variety of ancillary tasks on Astronomical Data. It comes from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory. It is primarily for Radio Astronomy. There is a Usenet newsgroup alt.sci.astro.aips that deals with AIPS issues and has occasional interesting announcements. There is a FAQ (answers to Frequently Asked Questions) for this newsgroup too.

A memo dating from 1994 provides a nice Summary of the NRAO AIPS Project (PostScript, 655773 bytes). An older AIPS memo describing the AIPS Software System (PostScript, 190706 bytes) can also be retrieved. The latter contains an interesting schematic diagram of the overall AIPS structure.

If you want to retrieve AIPS, it should be available via anonymous ftp. Binary installations for Linux (32 and 64 bit), Max OS/X (Intel) and Linux are available. Download install.pl via ftp and the "perl install.pl -n" to install the software. AIPS is no longer available on recorded media.

Show me with pictures!

Ok. On the left is a raw image. On the right is the processed image.

Any questions? :-)

For the curious, these two images above are from the small DDT Test (nothing to do with chemicals, stands for Dirty Dozen Tests), the UVMAP and VTESS images respectively.

Eric W. Greisen