NEWSIPS Software
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Software for the Calibration of IUE Data

Welcome to the IUE Calibration and Utilities Software page. All the spectral images obtained by the International Ultraviolet Explorer have been recalibrated by the NASA/ESA IUE Project using the NEWSIPS calibration pipeline. The NEWSIPS software is currently being ported to the IRAF environment to allow users to recalibrate their images with certain custom processing options that may be more appropriate for their science.

The NEWSIPS pipeline is included in an IRAF layered package called iue. General information about the iue package can be found below, but the project to port NEWSIPS also includes providing certain utilities and documentation to facilitate analysis of IUE data with existing IRAF, TABLES, and STSDAS tasks.

Obtaining the Software

IUE External Package

The iue package, which includes the NEWSIPS pipeline, is currently in alpha-testing, and a public release is planned in the near future. Some of the utilities, including data format conversion tasks, are offered in a package called iuetools. This small package is available independently for personal installation (see description below). The following resources will be offered from the ftp distribution area when the full newsips package is released:
  • tar of source files
  • User Guide & Installation Manual
  • Calibration reference files

IUETOOLS Personal Package

NEW!!New Version (V1.1)

The current version, V1.1, was released on 9-Aug-1999. This version corrects a bug in the "mxexpand" task, and eliminates the dependence in V1.0 on the STSDAS package. For further details, see the package release notes. Current users of this package are encouraged to upgrade.

The subset package, called iuetools is available separately from the iue external package (see above) for personal installation. This package includes two utilities for converting the archived files containing the extracted spectra (.mxlo or .mxhi files) to formats compatible with various STSDAS and IRAF tasks, such as igi and splot. There is also a utility for generating a short summary of the file headers.

The following resources can be obtained from the ftp distribution area:

System Requirements

Both the iue and iuetools packages depend upon the following software:

Both of these packages must be installed and properly configured on your system in order for the software offered here to install and work correctly.

Contributed Software

IRAF users who analyze IUE data occasionally write CL scripts or small compiled tasks for special analysis purposes. As a courtesy to these authors and to further support in IRAF for the IUE community, we are making such contributed software available from the NEWSIPS ftp site. Please note that the responsibility for the use, support, and maintenance of contributed software rests with the authors.

About the IUE Package...

The NEWSIPS calibration software was originally developed for the IUE Observatory Final Archive. This iue package, including the port of the NEWSIPS pipeline, is being developed by Richard A. Shaw and Howard A. Bushouse (Space Telescope Science Institute). Our goal is to offer to the community a pipeline which reproduces to good accuracy the calibrated products in the IUE final archive when given the same input parameters, but which provides additional, custom processing options to enable users to optimize the science from their particular programs.

A paper describing the scope of this package by Shaw & Bushouse is available in the ADASS VII proceedings: 1998, ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 145, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems VII, ed. R. Albrecht, R. N. Hook, & H. Bushouse (San Francisco: ASP), 103; a reprint of this paper is available in PDF format.

This project is funded by the NASA Astrophysics Data Program through grant NAG5-32697 to Space Telescope Science Institute.

Questions? Contact archive@stsci.edu
Dick Shaw (shaw@noao.edu)

Last update:
9 August 1999
  Copyright ©1999 The Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc. All Rights Reserved.