To:      Phyllis Jackson

From:    Eric Greisen

Date:    "1 July 1994"

Subject: Quarterly Report on AIPS (1994 Q2)

     By 28 June 1994, the 15JAN94 release of "Classic AIPS" had been
shipped to 80 institutions, 17 by magnetic tape and 63 by electronic
copies.  Preparations for releasing the 15JUL94 version are now well
under way.  Nothing has arisen so far to suggest that it will be
delayed significantly.  The AIPS programming group in Socorro was
increased by the addition of Athol Kemball, an expert on VLBI
spectral-line polarimetry.

     During the quarter, we began the substantial work of rewriting
the user manual called the "AIPS CookBook".  A number of new chapters
will appear in the 15JUL94 release.  All chapters of the CookBook are
made available via the World Wide Web as well.  Users can fetch the
new chapters as they are actually completed by fetching the files via
the WWW (or via anonymous ftp).

     A port of AIPS to SGI computers was added to the system during
the quarter.  As usual, the magnetic tape routines are uncertain, but
the rest of the port has checked out well.  We extend our thanks to
Jeffrey A. Pedelty of the Goddard Space Flight Center for doing the
initial port and then making his computer available to us for later
testing.  The magnetic tape routines for our ports to the DEC Alpha
(OSF/1) and LINUX (PCs) systems were completed and, the former were
then thoroughly tested and used.  A number of bugs in the code to
convert floating-point binary formats were corrected and several
sources of floating underflows were corrected.  Our dependence on
non-standard system software was reduced by our adding programs to
AIPS to convert printer files for printing on plain text and
PostScript printers.

     During the quarter, two new verbs were added to AIPS.  They are
TVSTAR to plot positions from "star" extension files directly on the
TV display and CHKNAME to allow procedure to test for a file's
existence and, thereby, avoid untimely terminations.  New tasks this
quarter include VBGLU to paste MKIII mode VLBA data, correlated in
multiple passes, back together and FXPOL to reformat dual-polarization
data from the VLBA correlator.  New task CPYRT adds copyrights to
images, primarily for the D and B array surveys, while task MFPRT
prints information from Model-Fit extension files (produced by SAD)
for use by external modeling programs.  The automatic source finding
and fitting task SAD was enhanced to produce more reliable and correct
solutions.  A significant bug in the handling of parallactic angle in
calibrating both VLA and VLBA polarization was corrected.


File: /home/primate/egreisen/AIPS/reports/QRep94b.TXT