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

May 2000 - release of V1.0
Nov 2000 - release of V1.1
Jul 2001 - release of V1.2

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 layered package called "stecf". This 
package contains several subpackages. One contains a variety of image 
restoration algorithms including multiple channel and photometric variants 
of the Richardson Lucy method. 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.

This package is also included in the ESO Scisoft software collection.

A brief description of this package was published in the proceedings
of ADASS 99 (http://adass.org/adass/proceedings/adass99/P2-21/). This 
paper is also available at the URL given above.

***************************************************************************

Revision Notes:

First release (V1.0) May 2000.
Second release (V1.1) November 2000.
Third release (V1.2) July 2001.

 V1.1 - drizzle v1.41 has been removed from the driztools package as it
        is now available in stsdas.analysis.dither. The "drizzle" variable
        is now also not set to avoid confusion.

        Impol has been upgraded to V2.0 which includes ACS support.

 V1.2 - new package "specres" from Jeremy Walsh is now included. This is
        a set of tasks for spectral image restoration and extraction.

 V1.2+ - a small patch to fix problems with traxy and tranback in the
         stecf.driztools package

 V1.2++ - December 3rd 2001 - update a file in the specres package

***************************************************************************

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. These are required to build the STECF
	package.

1)	The package is distributed as a compressed tar archive. The 
	tar archive 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-v1.2.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 <directory>/stecf.  Make the appropriate file name 
	substitutions for your site.
 
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	= <directory>/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 
	    % cd ..
	    % zcat $ftpdir/stecf-v1.2.tar.Z | tar xvf -

	The archive file can be deleted once the package has been
	successfully installed.
 
6)      Restart IRAF and "cd stecf".

7)	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 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 2.6, 
        HP-UX 10.20 and Linux (Redhat 6.2) and will probably do so on other 
        architectures although this isn't guaranteed.

8)      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 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)
Updated to V1.1, November 2000.
Typo fix (in mkpkg line), January 2001
Updated to V1.2, July 2001