STECF -- An IRAF package of Utilities developed at the ST-ECF
 
Richard Hook, Jeremy Walsh, Richard Hook & Wolfram Freudling

May 2000 - V1.2 September 2001
June 2003 - V1.5

We have collected together many of the astronomical applications
developed as Iraf tasks at the Space Telescope European Coordinating
Facility (ST-ECF) into an Iraf package called "stecf". This package 
contains several subpackages. One contains a variety of image 
restoration algorithms including a multiple channel photometric variant
of the Richardson Lucy method. A newer version of the Drizzle image
combination engine as well as a few support tools for it can be found
here and in addition a wholly new package ("impol") 
for the reduction of polarimetric imaging from HST (and ground-based 
instruments) is made available for the first time. Software for the 
post-pipeline processing of HST NICMOS data, with particular emphasis on 
the association and pre-processing of images to be used for grism spectral 
extraction, and finally a general purpose grism spectral extraction tool 
are also included. 

The package may be down-loaded from http://www.stecf.org/software/stecf-iraf/

and online help is available from the same place.

After the Revision Notes, you will find installation instructions.

A brief description of this package was published in the proceedings
of ADASS 99 which appeared in Summer 2000. This paper is also
available at the URL given above.

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Revision Notes:

First release (V1.0) May 2000.
Typo in mkpkg line corrected below (12/5/00)
Binaries for ssun and redhat made available and instructions updated (12/5/00)

V1.2 released, September 2001, major change is the addition of the SPECRES
package for spectroscopic restoration from Jeremy Walsh.

V1.5 released, June 2003, major changes to SPECRES, updates and new tasks
in DRIZTOOLS.

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To install this package in your local IRAF system, take the following steps:
 
0)      Make sure that you have the STSDAS and TABLES packages from STScI
	installed on your system if you want to build the STECF
	package from source. 

1)	The package is distributed as compressed tar archives. The 
	tar archives may be down-loaded from the above URL. To obtain the 
	package via ftp (assuming a UNIX computer):

	    % ftp ftp.stecf.org 
	    login: anonymous
	    password: [your user name]
	    ftp> cd pub/iraf
	    ftp> binary
	    ftp> get stecf-v1.5.tar.Z  
	      ...
	    ftp> quit

2)	Create a directory to contain the STECF external package files.  This
	directory should be outside the IRAF directory tree and must be owned
	by the IRAF account.  In the following examples, this root directory
	is named /stecf.  Make the appropriate file name 
	substitutions for your site. A personal installation is also possible
	in which case the definitions will go into a personal file such
	as loginuser.cl rather than the system extern.pkg.
 
3)	Log in as IRAF and edit the extern.pkg file in the hlib directory to
	define the package to the CL.  From the IRAF account, outside the CL,
	you can move to this directory with the command:

            % cd $hlib

	Define the environment variable stecf to be the pathname to the stecf
	root directory.  UNIX pathnames must be terminated with a '/'.
	Edit extern.pkg to include:

            reset stecf	= 
            task  stecf.pkg   = stecf$stecf.cl

	Near the end of the hlib$extern.pkg file, update the definition
	of helpdb so it includes the stecf help database, copying the syntax
	already used in the string.  Add this line before the line containing
	a closing quote:
 
	    ,stecf$lib/helpdb.mip\

4)      Add to hlib$clpackage.men the package description:
 
            stecf - STECF utilities package from ESO/ST-ECF
 
5)	Unpack the tar file into the STECF root directory.

	On a UNIX system, where ftpdir is the pathname of the directory
	into which the package was ftp'ed and stecf is the STECF root
	directory:
	    % cd $stecf 
	    % zcat $ftpdir/stecf-v1.5.tar.Z | tar xvf -

	The archive file can be deleted once the package has been
	successfully installed.
 
  At this stage you can either install binaries which are available from
  the web pages for some architectures or alternatively build the package
  from source.

  First the binaries option:

6a) Download the appropriate compressed tar file from the same place.
    The naming convention is stecf-v1.5-bin.{arch}.tar.Z - eg,
    stecf-v1.2-bin.ssun.tar.Z for Solaris.

7a) Expand the compressed file in the "stecf" package top-level
    directory:

	% cd $stecf
	% zcat $ftpdir/stecf-v1.5-bin.{arch}.tar.Z | tar xvf -

	Delete the compressed tar file when it is no longer needed.

8a) Make sure that the bin directory is appropriately linked:

	% rm bin
	% ln -s bin.{arch} bin

     Jump to step 9...

Alternatively, if you need to rebuild follow these steps:

6b)     Restart IRAF and "cd stecf".

7b)	Symbolically link the appropriate binary directory to bin.
	bin is originally linked to bin.generic for distribution.

        On a SPARCstation running Solaris 2.*, type
	    cl> mkpkg ssun

        On a DEC Alpha running Digital Unix, type
	    cl> mkpkg alpha

        On a PC running Linux, type
	    cl> mkpkg linux

        Other architectures are available and have corresponding bin.{arch}
	directories. For additional architectures, make a directory with the 
	proper bin.{arch} name, and link it to bin

        Note that this package has been built successfully on Solaris 2.8, HP-UX
	and Linux (Redhat 7.3) and will probably do so on other architectures
	although this isn't guaranteed.

8b)     Make the package by typing
	    cl> mkpkg -p stsdas update >&spool

	The spool file should be reviewed upon completion to make sure
	there were no errors.

9)	Up-to-date hypertext help is available on the World Wide Web at

	http://www.stecf.org/software/stecf-iraf/

10)     Problems with the installation should be reported to rhook@eso.org

Richard Hook, May 2000 (based on the rvsao installation instructions written
			by Doug Mink)

Small revisions for V1.2 release, Richard Hook, September 2001

Small revisions for V1.5 release, Richard Hook, June 2003

Maintained by Richard Hook Richard.Hook@eso.org