@@
@;  Copyright (C) 1995
@;  Associated Universities, Inc. Washington DC, USA.
@;
@;  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
@;  modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as
@;  published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of
@;  the License, or (at your option) any later version.
@;
@;  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
@;  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
@;  MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
@;  GNU General Public License for more details.
@;
@;  You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public
@;  License along with this program; if not, write to the Free
@;  Software Foundation, Inc., 675 Massachusetts Ave, Cambridge,
@;  MA 02139, USA.
@;
@;  Correspondence concerning AIPS should be addressed as follows:
@;          Internet email: aipsmail@nrao.edu.
@;          Postal address: AIPS Project Office
@;                          National Radio Astronomy Observatory
@;                          520 Edgemont Road
@;                          Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475 USA
@@







*******************************************************************
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                        AIPS : A Manual                          *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                          Volume I                               *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                          Editted by                             *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                        Eric W. Greisen                          *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                National Radio Astronomy Observatory             *
*                                                                 *
*                     NRAO Computer Division                      *
*                                                                 *
*                Users' Manual Series, Number 31                  *
*                                                                 *
*                          June 15, 1981                          *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*                                                                 *
*******************************************************************
@@

                     Acknowledgements


     This manual and the programs in the AIPS system are the work
of a great many individuals.  Direct contributors to Volume I are
Edward B. Fomalont and myself.  The programmers listed below wrote
the HELP files reproduced in Chapter IV.  Contributors to Volume II
are Walter Jaffe, Gary Fickling, Bill Cotton, and myself.  The
programmers created volumes III and IV.

     The programming staff at NRAO Charlottesville now includes:

              Edward B. Fomalont, project manager
              Eric W. Greisen, software supervisor and gofer
              Donald C. Wells, System Scientist
              Walter Jaffe, System Scientist
              William Cotton, System Scientist
              Gary Fickling, Programmer
              David Brown, systems programmer
              Fred Schwab, mathematician

All have contributed valuable ideas and software.  Bob Burns, the head
of the Computer Division, has provided much needed moral support and
assistance in the purchasing and maintenance of the hardware.  Bill
Meredith, Bill Wireman, Gene Runion, and Walter Brown have all had a
hand in maintaining the hardware.

     Former NRAO employees have also contributed.  The POPS language
was developed by Jerry Hudson.  It was expanded and applied first to
astronomical problems by Tom Cram.  Tom also participated heavily in
the early discussions about AIPS and in the development of a pre-
liminary version called VPOPS.

     Employees of other institutions have also begun to contribute to
the project.  Stuart Button of the University of Toronto has helped
to write a VLA data self-calibration program.  Frank Ghigo of the
University of Minnesota has offerred numerous, well-documented
suggestions on improving the transportability of AIPS to odd-ball
machines such as CDCs.

@@


     The Astronomical Image Processing System ("AIPS") is a collection
of computer hardware and software intended to perform a wide range of
reduction, analysis, and display functions on astronomical data.  It
has been designed in a very general fashion in order to encompass a
large variety of data types and in order to facilitate the addition of
new applications and algorithms.  The project is supervised by a
programming group at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in
Charlottesville, Virginia.  However, everyone is encouraged to write
new routines, try them on their local system, and then submit them to
the Charlottesville group for inclusion in the main package.  In the
end, we hope to offer a substantial capability not only for maps from
the VLA, but also for data from other radio, optical and x-ray
astronomy instruments.

     The documentation of AIPS is divided into four volumes: a
users' guide, a programmers' guide, an alphabetized summary of all
routines, and the detailed program listings.  This first volume, the
users' guide, consists of four chapters:

         I. Getting started with AIPS
        II. User-to-program communication
       III. Available applications
        IV. HELPs: all the details

The first chapter is a cursory review of the features of AIPS and is
designed to help the novice user to try out the program.  The second
chapter contains a more detailed discussion of the simple computer
language, POPS, which performs the communication between the users and
the programs.  The third chapter is a somewhat detailed review by
catagory of the available applications.  The last chapter lists all
of the run-time HELPs files available to the user.  These files contain
detailed information about each task, verb, pseudoverb, and adverb in
the system.  New users of AIPS will benefit from a serious study of
the first three chapters.  However, since AIPS contains a substantial
HELP capability and other forms of run-time documentation, users
should not find it necessary to memorize the details.

     We would like to offer the best product possible.  Therefore,
we encourage users and programmers to report any suggestions and
problems with the software and documentation to their local AIPS
manager.  Contributions of new software are also encouraged.
