Release Notes for STSDAS 3.5 27 March 2006 This release of STSDAS contains changes to SYNPHOT, NICMOS, CALSTIS, CALACS, aXe, MultiDrizzle, and the DITHER package. There were also changes made to support compilation of the code under new compilers on several platforms. A new task has been added; namely, PUFTCORR in the NICMOS package. Several deprecated packages and tasks were removed; specifically, focgeom and the prototype versions of PyDrizzle and MultiDrizzle. The specific changes are detailed in the following sections. Platform support ================ Binaries for this release were built on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, Solaris 5.8, and Mac OS X 10.3.9. Libraries ========= No changes have been implemented in any of the libraries provided with STSDAS. HST_CALIB.SYNPHOT ================= - Corrected throughput files available. New throughput files for several non-HST bandpasses are available at: ftp://ftp.stsci.edu/pub/software/stsdas/refdata/synphot/synphot1.tar.Z NOTE: You can insure that you have the new files by verifying that the date for this file, synphot1.tar.Z, is after 1-March-2006. The filter throughput functions for Johnson UBV, Strömgren uvby, Cousins RI, and Landolt UBVRI (= Johnson UBV + Cousins RI) have been adapted according to the results of Maíz Apellániz 2006 (AJ 131, 1184) to include the following changes: - The old throughput functions were expressed in energy-integrating form, as opposed to the photon-counting that should always be used in synphot. This error has been corrected. - New throughput functions for Johnson U (= Landolt U) and Strömgren u have been calculated using STIS observations. The new functions introduce changes in the short-wavelength cutoff caused by the atmosphere. Also, for the case of Johnson colors, it corrects the unphysical definition of two different B bandpasses depending on whether U-B or B-V is calculated. Users should expect differences of up to several hundredths of magnitudes when comparing old and new synphot results that include those filters. In addition, one should remember that when comparing synthetic Johnson, Strömgren, Cousins, or Landolt vegamag magnitudes with observed data, a zero point needs to be added. Synphot does not include this additional step, which needs to be done by the user. The following table shows the recommended zero points: ----------------------------------------- Filter/Color/Index Zeropoint Reference (mag) ----------------------------------------- Johnson/Landolt V 0.026 1 Johnson/Landolt B-V 0.010 2 Johnson/Landolt U-B 0.020 2 Cousins/Landolt V-R -0.012 3 Cousins/Landolt V-I -0.002 3 Strömgren y 0.038 3 Strömgren b-y 0.007 2 Strömgren m_1 0.154 2 Strömgren c_1 1.092 2 ----------------------------------------- 1. Bohlin & Gilliland 2004 (AJ 127, 3508). 2. Maíz Apellániz 2006 (AJ 131, 1184). 3. Holberg & Bergeron 2006 (AJ, submitted). - Countrate documentation Language in the help file that described the passband specification for the countrate.magnitude parameter was corrected. The original language implied that Johnson bands were always used. The description was corrected to explain the Johnson/Cousins/Bessell convention actually in use. The language was expanded to indicate how to fully specify a bandpass supported by synphot; eg, johnson,r or sdss,g. The examples provided in this documentation were also updated to refer to FITS files instead of STSDAS tables for the BPGS reference spectra, since they have all been replaced by FITS versions. HST_CALIB.NICMOS ================ - SAACLEAN Significant algorithmic and error handling improvements have been made in SAACLEAN. Changes were also made to the SAACLEAN task parameters; - The GAINPLOT parameter was removed, and the value is now taken from the ADCGAIN keyword in header. - CRTHRESH,NOISETHRESH,BINSIGFRAC were added to replace previously hardcoded parameters. - The parameters were reordered so that all the saaper-related parameters occur together. - The INFILE parameter was replaced by two new parameters for input files: CALCIMAGE is the image from which the SAA correction is calculated, and TARGIMAGE is the image to which the correction will be applied. - A CLOBBER parameter was added to permit overwriting existing files. This parameter was added as a "query" parameter, so it will explicitly ask the user if it was not explicitly set. This permits the correction to be applied in place (if OUTPUT is the same as TARGIMAGE), as well as permitting other diagnostic files, persistence model files, etc, to be overwritten. - 2 new parameters, HISTBINWIDTH and NCLIP, were added. These are passed to imagestats when analyzing the saa persistence image histogram to compute the threshold separating the high and low signal domains. The help file for this task was also updated: - The help file was modified to reflect new "query" status of saaperfile parameter. An example was also removed (since SAAPERFILE is now required). - Help files were updated to reflect changes to task parameters. - A discussion was updated to describe several new parameters which were added to the task in an earlier version. References to "pedsky" were replaced with "pedsub" throughout, since "pedsub" is more robust and less sensitive to the characteristics of the data. In general, we recommend the use of "pedsub" for pedestal correction. - PUFTCORR This new task was added to the NICMOS package to support correction of the 'Mr. StayPuft' artifact in NICMOS exposures. This task has been included as a beta release to be run on an 'as-is' basis. Any feedback on how this task performs would be appreciated and used to improve the final release version of this task in the next public release. - ITERSTAT The new parameter 'npix' was added to the list of output parameters. PLAYPEN ======= - ILS Warning messages from compilation were removed by correcting a problem with how the function 'il_bclean' was defined. HST_CALIB.STIS ============== -CALSTIS CALSTIS has been updated to Version 2.20. The expression for correcting for CTE loss was modified to include a term for the "red halo" for G750L or G750M data. Two new columns, HALOFAC and HALOMINFRAC, are now read in from the CCDTAB (if they are present). - X2D The algorithm for interpolating the error estimates (the ERR extension) has been modified. With the previous algorithm, when the interpolated value was an average over several pixels, the result would have a lower error than the input value. The new algorithm is based on the principle that when a user sums over an area in an interpolated image and adds the errors in quadrature, the resulting error estimate for the summed flux should be essentially the same as the result that would be obtained for an equivalent area in the original uninterpolated image. A new parameter, ERR_ALG, was added to the x2d task to give the option of using the previous algorithm; the default is to use the new algorithm. HST_CALIB.ACS ============= CALACS was updated to Version 4.6.1. An error in assigning IDs to sub-products when ASN members are missing was fixed. Sub-products are now assigned an ID while missing members are not. HST_CALIB.ACS.AXE ================= The version of aXe distributed with the ACS package was updated to Version 1.5.1. More details on the specific changes included in aXe-1.5.1, as well as the user manual, can be found at: http://www.stecf.org/software/aXe/ ANALYSIS ======== - DRIZZLE - 'drizzle' code was corrected to properly run 'sinc' kernel for blotting. This upgraded 'callable blot' to '0.6' and STSDAS blot to 3.4.1. - MultiDrizzle MultiDrizzle has been updated to version 2.7.2. The primary changes include: - New parameters FINAL_UNITS and UPDATEWCS have been added to the interface. The new FINAL_UNITS parameter allows the user to produce drizzled products which have either units of electrons/sec or DN. The UPDATEWCS parameter turns on or off the use of 'makewcs', and when turned off will not modify the WCS keywords for the input images. - MultiDrizzle was modified to treat ACS (and STIS) images which have NGOODPIX == 0 as if they had EXPTIME==0. This usually only happens when the entire image gets saturated as detected by CALACS (or CALSTIS), and would cause 'createMedian' to crash when included. - Output crmask file now gets written out explicitly as a UInt8 array instead of platform-specific INT. (64-bit support issue) - In the driz_cr module, a message was added to warn users that the SNR and scale parameters only use 2 input values when more than two values are provided. This was done to address an issue where users believed that they could input any number of values.