Version 4.4-9 ============= The cubehelix0 colormap has been added to the quick lookups in the main panel. A new toolbox to display IVOA MOCs over images has been added. MOCs can also be export from the image regions toolbox. Various bugs in the display of ARD regions have been fixed. Star-2018A Release ================== Important bug fix: A problem with accessing CDS and other services using Apache has been fixed. Previously Skycat used a non-standard end of line encoding resulting in a HTTP 400 response. When reading a multiple-line ARD region to extract a spectrum, all newlines and spaces are removed so that it can be saved. Key fonts with compound names can now be saved to the configuration of the contour toolbox. Star-2016A Release ================== Following hyperlinks in the help system should be working again. Previously clicking on a hyperlink could result in a mangled URL causing a failure. Added the APASS DR9 CDS catalogue to the standard list. Saving or sending (using SAMP) a spectrum that was extracted from a cube using a multi-line ARD region should now work. Saving the configuration of the contour toolbox failed if the key font had a compound name. This is now fixed. Star-2016A Release ================== Version 4.4-8 ============= The RA and Dec labels shown in the main panel can now be forced to display RA: and Dec: rather than unicode alpha and delta. Use the command line option "-unicoderadec 0" to control this. Also a File->Startup options... selected option under the Fonts tab. Show decimal degrees immediately when selected in the pick object toolbox. The GAIA Satellite all source catalogue has been added to the standard Skycat catalogues. Other versions are available using VO catalogues. Version 4.4-7 ============= Star-2015B Release ================== Fix problem with object detection toolbox failing to set the correct number of objects detected in the catalogue window. The URAT1 catalogue has been added to the standard Skycat catalogues. The centroid option in optimal photometry is now disabled. This has always been true, just previously toggling this control had no effect. Add work around for problems when printing a colour ramp from an image that has a very large data range. Previously this failed completely. Star-2015A Release ================== Version 4.4-6 ============= It is now possible to do limited catalogue queries using the Table Access Protocol (TAP) and then plot the results. A new toolbox in the VO support section of the "Data-Servers" menu is provided for this. RegTap can now be used when query for VO resources, such as catalogues and images. This uses TAP to form the query offering greater flexibility and ease. Various usability issues in the VO support toolboxes have been fixed. These should now be more robust against failure. Support for the VOTable 1.3 standard has been added. A bug that caused GAIA to exit uncontrollably when interrupting a stalled skycat-style catalogue download has been fixed. The GAIA 3D visualisation toolbox has been updated to work with VTK 6.1. The object detection toolbox has been updated to work with the latest version of EXTRACTOR (2.19-5). A problem capturing images under OS X and XQuartz 2.7.7 has been worked around. A problem when using a FITS mask with a displayed NDF has been fixed. Previously this would always generate NaN values instead of BAD ones. Masking now does the documented action of not masking areas with non zero values when no value is supplied. Compound images now respect the blank pixel colour selection. A bug in the handling of special characters in file names when interoperating with other VO enabled applications has been fixed. Star-2014A Release ================== Version 4.4-5 ============= A new toolbox for displaying histograms of rectangular regions of the displayed image has been added. It is now possible to load a list of positions into the aperture photometry toolbox. Apertures loaded this way will be given default parameters avoiding the need to create a full AUTOPHOTOM format input. A serious bug that stopped images with modified astrometries from being saved to disk has been fixed. Users experiencing this issue should downgrade or get the development release. A bug in the printing of the colour ramp (which caused GAIA to exit) has been fixed. This was introduced when support for handling -TAB world coordinate systems (4.4-2). A long standing bug when printing the main image to postscript has been fixed. Previously when logged into a machine remotely printing did not work correctly depending on the image zoom and scroll position. Various skycat catalogues that have been abandoned have been removed from the default list. Some of these have been replaced with Vizier equivalents. The NED object searches have been changed to use the NED service directly, rather than the ESO services which have been retired. Saving the graphics toolbox context in world coordinates did not work correctly for the circle, ellipse and rotbox types. The problem was mainly seen when restoring graphics at different zooms -- when the figures were offset or scaled to the wrong size. This problem has been fixed. Restoring graphics that included marker types (produced by the positions and 3D toolboxes) previously failed, causing GAIA to crash. This has been fixed. Version 4.4-4 ============= A new toolbox for drawing STC-S regions has been added. It is now possible to add local colour and intensity maps to GAIA by adding files to the ~/.skycat/colormaps directory. These files need to be in the correct format, that is simple text files with either three columns (RGB for colour maps) or one column (intensity) whose values are in the range 0 to 1. Colour maps should use the file type ".lasc" and intensity maps ".iasc". A bug in the handling of the WCS from FITS files with size greater than 2Gb has been fixed. Previously GAIA could fail to show the world coordinates for such images. The UCAC4 catalogue has been added to the standard Skycat catalogues. Kapuahi Release =============== Version 4.4-3 ============= A snapshot can now be taken of the whole image, including the off-screen parts, so it is now possible to capture a graphic of the whole image at full or higher resolution when it is larger than the main window. This is in the main window "File" menu as "Full snapshot...". Note that the default graphics format is now PNG (GIF no longer works when there are overlay graphics). Several issues with the axes plotting in the 3D visualisation toolboxes have been fixed. A free form entry area for AST attributes has also been introduced so that the axes can be configured. The "Intensity Map:" selector in the main panel has been replaced by a "Color Scale:" selector. This still provides linear and log-like intensity mapping of the displayed image, so no features have been removed. Color scaling gives a more careful transformation of intensity into log-like space, reducing the false contouring seen in low intensities. The square root colour scale is now also available from this control, as well as more negative mappings options. As part of these changes the colour scale algorithms themselves (note these are also found in the View->Colors window, as well as the "Color Scale:" selector) have been tweaked to give better log and square root mappings. Errors in the default intensity and colormaps have been fixed to remove a discontinuous change that could show up as a false contour (this has been present for many years). When connecting the coordinate system of a catalogue to that of the displayed image the current coordinate system will now always be used in preference to any other available system. Previously if you had another celestial coordinate system in addition to the current one, that would be used in preference to the current one. This avoids problems with secondary coordinate systems that are incorrect or not as accurate as the current one. FITS files with more than one period in their names will now be handled by the analysis toolboxes. Previously names like "a.b.c.d.fits" would give an error when a conversion to the NDF format was attempted. This uses enhancements to the CONVERT package. Image slices will now use start and end points anywhere within the region of the displayed pixel. Previously the region of the end points started at the middle of the previous pixel and extended in the middle of the selected pixel. Fix a bug in the CUPID catalogue import that stopped more than one being imported using the same session. Kaulia Release ============== Version 4.4-2 ============= Support has been added for reading the -TAB WCS FITS format. The display of decimal degrees can now be forced using a command-line option -force_degrees, or as a permanent choice using a startup option. The USNO NOMAD catalogue has been added to the list of Skycat catalogues. NOMAD is a simple merge of the Hipparcos, Tycho-2, UCAC-2 and USNO-B1 catalogues. A problem reading FITS catalogues that have radians stored as single precision values has been fixed. Previously the precision used when converting to sexagesimal and degrees wasn't sufficient and RA could be truncated at a 1/10th of a degree. Namaka release ============== Version 4.4-1 ============= The blink toolbox can now be scrolled to show approximately the same position as the main window by pressing the "c" key. Images with swapped sky RA/Dec axes would no longer display catalogue symbols. This has been fixed. A bug loading local tab tables has been fixed. Previously new tables could not have X-Y coordinate systems defined as the x_col: and y_col: parameters were ignored. This bug was introduced at version 4.2-2. VOTables sent to GAIA using SAMP were being rejected if they contained non-fatal problems. This no longer happens and the warnings are written to the console. The object detection toolbox has been changed so that only the current FITS image will be scanned for images. Previously if the primary HDU contained an image and other images where located in any extensions all the images would be processed when attempting to process just the primary image. This behaviour was in conflict with images in extensions which were just processed individually. The page up and page down keys will now scroll the main image up and down and control page up and down left and right (requires the keyboard focus to be in the main image). Negative mask values are implicitly excluded by the mask toolbox. Previously if you supplied a mask containing negative values this caused an access violation. These values are now correctly ignored. The VO query toolboxes now convert the default query coordinates from the image celestial coordinate system to FK5/J2000. Support for the FLUX_RADIUS parameter has been added to the object detection toolbox. This determines the half-light radius (actually radius which contains half of the auto flux) by default. A bug in the overlay grid graphics handler has been fixed. Previously use of a lot of fonts could cause GAIA to crash. The "gaiadisp" command now accepts the options "-l" and "-h". These set the data limits to use when displaying the image. The spectral extraction display can now show the coordinate of the reference line. Some old skycat catalogue server descriptions have been changed so that unused columns, or columns that are no longer fully populated, are removed from the plotting symbols. This will require the skycat.cfg file to be updated. Hawaiki release =============== Version 4.4-0 ============= GAIA and Skycat have been updated to use Tcl/Tk 8.5 and most of the associated packages have also been updated. The major visible changes are the arrival of anti-aliased fonts and the updating of some widgets. The font used for displaying symbols (the alpha and delta symbols shown in the main panel) is no longer required as unicode fonts are now used by default. This also means that unicode symbols can be drawn in overlay text. The font handling for the astrometry grid overlay has also been changed to use anti-aliased fonts and unicode. Note if you have saved your startup options you will see a message: "Warning: rejected incompatible session persistent option: -wcsfont" when GAIA starts up. To get rid of this just re-apply the options in the startup options window (File menu). During this update the ability to get the grid overlay fonts to scale with the zoom factor has been removed. Hopefully now that rotated text is clearer this will not be needed. Other changes: The X, Y, RA and DEC coordinate readouts have been changed so you can now enter a new position and centre on it (assuming the position isn't off image, or near to an edge, in those cases the image will just scroll to the edge). The "Filter" button in a Skycat catalogue window has been enhanced so that it now removes any off-image objects, unless there are objects that are not plotted, in which case it removes them (this was the old behaviour). It is now possible to select a colour and font for labelling objects displayed by a Skycat catalogue window. Previously this could only be done using the graphics toolbox facilities. The optional coordinate label in the spectral extraction plot can now have the filename displayed as a prefix to the coordinates of the extraction. To enable this select the "Full coordinate label" item in the "Options" menu. Note that this and the old "Coordinate label" are now session persistent. A problem displaying CUPID catalogues that include extra columns (using the extracols=1 parameter) has been fixed. Previously an "Unknown STC shape" error was thrown. The detection of compressed images in FITS file has been improved. Previously only those with EXTNAME of COMPRESSED_IMAGE where detected. A bug in the 2D mask toolbox caused GAIA to crash when a given mask didn't exist. This has been fixed. The Skycat catalogue windows now have a "Clear all objects" item in the "Options" menu. This quickly clears all the plotting symbols from the image. The UCAC3 catalogue has been added to the standard Skycat catalogues. Short integer data types (FITS BITPIX 16 & -16, HDS _WORD & _UWORD) may now have data display limits outside those of the data type. Previously these data types unexpectedly wrapped or refused to extend the contrast when given limits outside the data range. The patch toolbox now says when you have not defined any background regions. Previously an uninformative error dialog was shown. The import plain text file dialog now supports the definition of the RA and Dec celestial coordinate system. If the current directory or the one pointed to by GAIA_TEMP_DIR is not writable temporary files will be written into /tmp instead. The presence of illegal negative variance values should be handled when requesting that they be displayed as errors. Previously this condition caused GAIA to abort. Version 4.3-1 ============= The C-shell initialisation scripts used to start GAIA commands have all been replaced with sh scripts. Any personal aliases etc. based on the old scripts will need to be changed to use the sh replacements. When extracting regions using the regions toolbox the default action is now to also autocrop the result removing any surrounding blank areas. A bug in the positioning of the grid axes when the image has swapped RA and Dec axes has been fixed. Previously an attempt to explicitly position the axes failed. Nanahope release ================ Version 4.3-0 ============= The most significant changes in this release are the introduction of facilities for querying the Virtual Observatory for images and catalogues. These new query toolboxes are located in the Data-Analysis menu. Other significant changes are the introduction of support for the visualisation of 2D and 3D clumps detected by the CUPID package, support for the VOTable catalogue format and various special other catalogue types created by the SMURF and KAPPA packages. Catalogues with suitable descriptions will now have their coordinate systems matched to that of the displayed image. For instance this means you can now query for catalogue positions in J2000 and plot over an image set to B1950 and vice versa. Finally the GAIA has been updated to use the new SAMP protocol for interoperating with other desktop applications (TOPCAT, SPLAT etc). This replaces PLASTIC support, which has been removed. Other changes include: The mean angles reported by the select positions toolbox are now normalised as position angles. Previously they were just the arithmetic mean. New options in the spectral extraction window now forces the X and Y coordinates to be positive. This is useful when drawing the with log scaling. Several problems when determining the min/max values and percentile cuts displayed in the main window have been fixed. A bug in the pick object toolbox has been fixed. Previously if you opted for RA and Dec in degrees this setting would be ignored when zooming. Many changes to the XY profile toolbox have been made. This now displays the position along the X and Y axes (previously an offset was shown), along with the value and position of the peaks and the coordinate ranges of each profile. It is also possible to display the peak values using lines drawn in the profiles and on the main image. The blank pixel colour is now preserved when new colour tables are loaded. Time-series spectra extracted from cubes can now be displayed showing the elapsed time from the first observation. The coordinate system used when handling a cube can now be changed to display pixel and grid coordinates, as well as spectral ones. A new command-line option -rtd_autocut has been added. This applies the -default_cut percentile to any images received by the realtime interface. The contour toolbox now detects cubes displayed in other windows and will step through the slices of the cube contouring each in turn over the displayed image. See the help in the contour toolbox for how to use this. A bug in the operation of the patch toolbox has been fixed. Previously GAIA could crash when using very small detached sky regions. A bug in the handling of temporary images created by the regions toolbox has been fixed. Previously if more than one instance of this toolbox was in use the names of the temporary files could clash. The gaiadisp command now uses the RTD_REMOTE_DIR environment variable to locate the .rtd-remote file (GAIA already did this). The text importer toolbox is no longer shared between all cloned windows. Each window now has it's own instance so that more than one import can be done at a time. A bug in saving and restoring the overlay graphics has been fixed. This was introduced when dashed lines were offered as an option for contouring. A bug tracking coordinates using the arrow keys and the "Show all coordinates" toolbox has been fixed. Previously the reported Y coordinates were those of the last position, not the current one. It is now possible to resize the 3D toolboxes during the first rendering. Previously this could case the application to terminate. The 3D scene now offers lighting controls. A bug in the positioning of the 3D direction axes has been fixed. The baseline subtraction tool in the cube toolbox now allows for the output cube to be given a named prefix. The default celestial coordinate system for FITS files is now FK5/J2000. The cube animation controls now allow the reversal of the order of slices displayed by interchanging the lower and upper limits. Previously the animation always ran from the least index to the higher one regardless of the given order. Lehuakona Release ================= Version 4.2-2 ============= A snapshot feature that captures the main window display to a graphics file has been added. Supported formats are GIF, JPEG, PNG and TIFF. The pick object toolbox will now report the FWHM in arcseconds as well as pixels. The gaiadisp command now offers the facility to display an NDF data component, such as variance or quality using the -c flag. When using the -component command-line option to display a non-existent NDF component is now an error. After such an error the displayed component will reset to DATA. The VARIANCE component of an NDF can now be displayed in standard deviations using the component name ERROR. ERROR is also selectable in the NDF chooser dialog. NDFs stored in the extensions of an NDF will now be offered for display in the various chooser and browser dialogs. Spectral extraction can now display error bars based on the data variance. The coordinate of the slice extracted from a cube can now be displayed as a label in the main window (and will be captured when creating an animation). A new command-line and startup option -pixel_indices is available. This changes the X and Y continuous readout displays to show NDF pixel indices, not grid coordinates. NDF pixel indices are like grid coordinates, but they include the NDF origin and are integer values. An experimental "autofill" option has been introduced. This works like "autoscale", but allows the X and Y scale factors to differ so that the image fills the main display. This option has several known issues, like graphics overlays will not always be drawn correctly and you cannot interchange the X and Y axes, but should be useful for long thin images and cube planes as coordinates readout and spectral extraction will work. Enable this using the "Options->Auto fill" item or by using the "-autofill 1" command-line option. Contour and grid overlay lines can now be drawn in dotted and dashed styles. Contour levels can now include missing values (previously attempting this caused a Tcl error). The AXIS component of an NDF cube will now be propagated with any extracted spectra. Previously this didn't happen so saved spectra could loose their coordinates. All dialogs for opening images, local catalogues and cubes have been enhanced to offer a new "Browse" facility. This allows you to view any FITS extensions (HDUs) or NDFs also present at the same level in the container. Local catalogues can now also have the HDU number given as part of their name (previously this effect could only be achieved by opening the FITS MEF as an image, selecting the catalogue using the HDU chooser and then loading the actual image). Cubes which at the same level as the currently accessed cube can now be selected using a chooser like that already available for images (View->Select HDU...). When opening an HDS container file that does not have an NDF at the top-level a search for cubes at the next level is now made and the first NDF found is opened (this has always been the behaviour when opening images). The data limits used for spectral extraction will now be updated when either a master starts an extraction, or the 3D scene starts moving the spectral extraction shape (region or line). A bug displaying the extraction limits on the spectral plot which caused the limits to be reversed when moving the graphics, has been fixed. New hot keys "1", "2" and "3" have been added to the 3D display for pointing an axis out of the screen. Note that the existing binding to "3" has been moved to "7" (switch to stereo mode). A new interaction for key "c" has been added to the 3D display. This centres the scene without changing the zoom. The cube toolbox can now display the data variances as standard deviations (ERROR component). When creating a channel map from a cube some of the combination estimators require more than one channel to operate (median for instance), this problem is now reported avoiding an uninformative error message. When capturing an animation to a GIF the main window must be clear of all overlapping windows. This requirement is now reported as a warning rather than a generic "too many colors" error messages. A bug handling integer images has been fixed. Previously contouring, XY extraction and region stats was broken for this data type (since version 4.0). The blink toolbox should now handle the case when RA and Dec are not axes aligned more effectively. A new command-line and startup option -font_scale has been introduced. This sets the scale of non-pixel based fonts or adjusts the padding around pixel-based ones (no reducing this makes the packing of labels more condensed). Choosing fonts is now easier using a font chooser dialog available in the startup options. When saving a FITS image with a new world coordinate system the old behaviour was to always write the astrometry in the format of the image. This has been changed so that FITS-PC astrometries will now be written in the standards complying FITS-WCS format (see SUN/211 for the details of this terminology). A bug when selecting the QUALITY component of a cube has been fixed. Previously the extracted image had the wrong data type so displayed incorrectly. Session persistent startup options that do not match the current version of GAIA will now be ignored. Previously this caused a fatal error and it was necessary to remove the properties files from $HOME/.skycat. This change will only work for future changes, so using different versions of GAIA sharing the same properties file will continue with this issue until after all your versions are at least as new as this release. A bug in the calculations of the offsets for extracted spectra has been corrected (the offsets where not corrected for latitude). A problem reading very large FITS extensions in NDFs has been fixed. This should speed up startup times. Local time "LT" has been added as a possible timescale for extracted timeseries spectra. The colour ramp shown at the bottom of the main window will now correctly update when a new colour or intensity map is selected. A description of the type of each cube axis will now be shown in the cube toolbox. When sending spectra to SPLAT it should now be possible to restart GAIA without restarting SPLAT (previously spectra open in SPLAT would not be superceded by new spectra sent from GAIA). A bug in the 3D toolboxes that meant reloading a cube with the same name under certain circumstances would fail. This issue should now be resolved (although re-using files with the same name remains unsupported). A problem reading coordinates from FITS tables has been fixed. These where being read without enough precision leading to alignment errors when displayed. A bug that stopped cube rebining using a factor of 5 has been fixed. Bugs in the code estimating the image scale, width and height have been fixed. This only affected images with swapped WCS axes (i.e. when Dec was the first axis and RA the second). Typing in the low: and high: entry fields has always fixed the display limits. This fact is now made clear by changing the labels of these two fields to display in blue. Several issues have also been fixed that should make this work more reliably. When a new astrometry has been created by the GAIA fit to reference stars an existing DATE-OBS or MJD-OBS value will now be preserved, when an EPOCH is not required as part of the system. Previously these values were set to the year 2000. Humu Release ============ Version 4.2-1 ============= GAIA-3D volume visualisation extension. --------------------------------------- New facilities for visualising data cubes have been developed for GAIA. These include the facility to display 3D iso-surfaces and also to do volume rendering. The current slice and spectral point extraction can also be rendered into the scene, and there are also facilities for drawing annotated axes and direction vectors. The scene is fully interactive and can be manipulated to view regions of interest, as well as move the current slice and spectrum. Readout of the celestial and spectral coordinates are also available (these work in the plane of the visualised slice). Finally it is also possible to display iso-surfaces of other cubes into the same scene for intercomparison purposes. See the "View" menu of the cube toolbox. A new command-line option "-autoscale" has been added. This enables the "View->Auto scale" option to scale the image to fit the main window and to keep it scaled when the main window is resized (but disables interactive control of the Scale: value). Also available as a persistent startup option. A new command-line option "-autofit" and "View->Auto fit" menu item has been added. This arranges for newly loaded images to fit the main window (unlike "Auto scale" this happens just once and control of the zoom remains active). Also available as a persistent startup option. A cube toolbox can now couple the position of its slice and spectral extraction to another toolbox so that cubes of the same size can be inspected concurrently. See the "Options" menu of a cube toolbox. The cube toolbox can now read an ARD region from a file. When saving an image with a new WCS the strategy for removing redundant information from FITS headers has been improved. A problem displaying cubes using the gaiadisp command has been fixed (reported an invalid NDF identifier when the cube spectral axis changed from that of the previous cube). Temporary files created by GAIA can now be placed into a named directory by defining the GAIA_TEMP_DIR environment variable. A bug reading BITPIX 32 FITS cubes has been fixed. This could result in blank data values not being ignored. It should now be possible to NDF byte data cubes. Previously these were handled incorrectly. The -hdu command-line option will now work again. This allows the selection of a extension when displaying an MEF. The display of cubes in MEFs is now possible using the -hdu or file.fits[hdu] forms on the command line, or by using the file.fits[hdu] form as the file name in the cube toolbox. FITS images containing floating point values will now assign any NaN values to the BLANK pixel colour. A memory leak when contouring external images over the displayed image has been fixed. The Tycho-2 catalogue has been added to the default list. A bug in the gaia_tcl program caused the gaiadisp command to fail under OS X. This has been fixed. When extracting spectra from ACSIS sparse cubes, the offset from the source position should now be correctly determined. A problem in the ROSAT catalogue query URL has been fixed. A problem opening NDFs with the same basename as a directory, in the same directory, has been fixed. The "Auto scale" feature now includes any graphics that have been drawn, so these now remain visible. The major fonts used in the interface may now be changed as startup options. Some platforms continue to provide poor size matching between the variable, fixed and symbol fonts. The mouse wheel will now scroll the main image (and some other components). Using it in combination with the control and shift keys gives horizontal scrolling (also available for horizontal wheels) and zooming. A bug open FITS cubes with sizes greater than 2Gb has been fixed. Previously these could be reported as having no dimensions. The time needed to open some NDFs with very large lookup tables in their WCS has been significantly decreased. A bug saving graphics that included contour lines to a disk file has been fixed (present since March 2006). Inline compressed images (e.g. RICE) can now have more than 2 dimensions. The scale factor used in the pick object zoom window is now a command-line and startup option. A -geometry command-line option is now available. This uses the standard X11 syntax, widthxheight+xoffset+yoffset. Other new command-line options, -blank_color, -image_background and -ident, which set the blank pixel colour and the background colour of the main window. -ident adds a string to the window title so that different instances of GAIA may be distinguished. Puana Release: ============== GAIA 4.0-0 ========== The version of Skycat that GAIA is based on has been updated to version 3.0-1. This has meant a major overhaul of the GAIA build system. The spectral offsets from the centre of observation of a cube now preserve the sense of the direction by including a sign (negative for west and south). A bug when writing an extracted spectrum to NDF and FITS files has been corrected. Previously the coordinates were incorrect by a single channel. When merging FITS headers from the primary data unit into those of an extension the INHERIT keyword is now checked. Inline compressed images (e.g. RICE) are now extracted more efficiently using built-in methods, rather than an external filter. The primary headers are now merged into such images as needed. Reading FITS catalogues is now also handled using built-in methods. This should be more efficient. FITS catalogues can now have 64 bit integer columns ('K' type). Compressed NDFs (.gz and .Z) can now be opened directly in the cube toolbox. Very small images (a few pixels wide or tall) now fill the zoom window. Previously small images did not show correctly. The rotatable box graphics item can now be used as a catalogue symbol. Re-opening modified cubes now works (via File->Re-open and gaiadisp). Data values are now only reported when moving over part of the image. Previously reports continued for an additional pixel to the bottom and left. When the first pixel has a NaN or blank value and has less than 10 pixels the lower value is now correctly set, rather than being left at the bad pixel value. GAIA 3.3-7 ========== The spectrum can now be re-extracted (after changing the extraction limits) by pressing a simple button, as well as by clicking on the image. The data range used to display the extracted spectrum can now be defined explicitly. The various bounds for extracting spectra etc. should now work correctly when the lower bound is greater than the upper bound. The output length of a TST catalogue line has been increased to 4096 characters. Previously this was 1024 which has become restricting (causing some failures to read FITS catalogues with many columns). The spectral cube window will now retain some settings between sessions. These include the background and line colours. FITS spectra now have the extraction meta-data added to their headers. The rebin cube tools now correct use "mean" as the combination method. Previously "sum" was used until either "mean" or "sum" was explicitly selected. FITS images that contain NaN values should now contour correctly. The default on-line catalogue list has been updated. Fixes a problem with NED CADC access and includes some new CADC catalogues and the JCMT archive. A bug that caused image region circles to be drawn at the wrong scale has been fixed. A bug extracting a TSYS value when cubes have greater image dimensions than expected has been fixed. The "gaiadisp" command has been extended to accept a percentile cut as a command-line option. The SMURF extension data are now ignored in their dimensions do not match the cube. This probably means the cube has had addition processing that makes the extension data invalid (or at least misleading). Hokulei Release: ================ This is an update with many usability changes and minor bug fixes: - New "Rebin" controls have been added to the cube toolbox. These allow the current cube to be rebinned and displayed. - New "Filter" controls have been added to the cube toolbox. These allow the current cube to be smoothed, image plane by image plane, using a box or gaussian filter. - A new "Go" menu has been added to the cube toolbox. This is similar to the main window menu, but only displays possible cubes, arranges for them to be efficiently loaded and attempts to preserve the current spectral extraction limits. - Spectra extracted from ACSIS cubes now contain various useful information, such as various RA and Decs, the exposure time of spectrum and the system temperature. These can be displayed by the SPLAT-VO application synopsis feature, when such a spectrum is sent to it. - The centroid maximum search box size and shift are now start up options that can be defined either on the command-line, or using the "File->Startup options..." dialog (this makes the change permanent) - The variance and quality components of a cube can now be displayed. - The FITS headers of a cube can now be inspected. - Spectra can now be sent to other PLASTIC-enabled applications using the Interop menu in the spectral plot window. Only SPLAT-VO supports this at present. - Extracted spectra can now be saved to NDF and FITS files. The "Send to SPLAT" options now send NDF spectra, previously they sent a text file. - Extracted spectra may now contain additional meta-data about the extraction position. This will be displayed in the SPLAT-VO synopsis. - An animated GIF of a range of image slices can now be created. - The grid overlay and celestial coordinate system toolboxes now support Horizon (AZEL) coordinates. - The celestial coordinates toolbox now supports the use of the sky reference position as an origin (for offset coordinates) or local pole. - Images of size 1x1 should now be accepted and handled as other images. Previously such small images had a special status which meant that no image was displayed. - Images that have one dimension of size 1 are now correctly autoranged and oriented (previously these were always drawn horizontally). - Cubes with trivial first and second dimensions are now loaded into the cube toolbox when -check_for_cubes is set. Previously these were considered as special form of images. - The measurement band now measures to the image edge, not middle of edge pixels. - A bug when extracting a spectrum over a restricted range meant that the coordinates of an NDF or FITS were incorrect (by an offset). This has been fixed. - Timeseries cubes can now be switched between different time scales. - The default cube axis is now selected to be the spectral one. Previously the third axis was always chosen. - The "send to SPLAT" option in the cube toolbox now sends the absolute name of the spectrum to be displayed. This means SPLAT may be started from another directory. - The "send to SPLAT" options in the cube toolbox have been extended to allow the spectrum to be compared to any existing ones (the old behaviour) and to replace any spectra already plotted. - Ranges used to extract spectra and control other operations are now preserved, except when the size of the underlying cube changes. This makes it easier to extract similar spectra and re-use baseline regions. - Channel maps now have a marker drawn to display the same position in each tile. The average spectral coordinate is also displayed and the channel map is given the same coordinate system as the used by the cube. - The coordinate system of a channel map is now matched to that of the current cube, so that any displayed coordinates are in the correct context. - When a cube is collapsed the result image is now in the same coordinates as the current ones in use by the toolbox. This gives the correct units for any integrated intensity measurements. - The distance ruler now measures to the middle of the final pixel to the top and right of the display. Previously this stopped one pixel further in. - FITS headers are now shown out to 80 characters. Previously they were truncated at 79. - The precession facility of the positions toolbox should now correctly transform the current list of coordinates, rather than a single position. - The cube spectral extraction now handles dependent axes (like RA and Dec), differently so that more extractions along one of these axes will succeed. - The XY profile toolbox can now be activated using control-e. This also avoids the prompt dialog reminding you to draw a rectangle. - The handling of broken WCS components in NDFs should now result in the display of an image/cube, without a WCS rather than an unrelated error report about a missing data component. - The direction compass is now always a fixed size, not one that depends on the image scale. Should now always be visible. - The initial order of baseline subtraction is now shown with the correct value (previously this was incorrect until the value was modified). - A bug causing a double free core dump when saving modified world coordinate systems for NDF data has been fixed. - A fatal bug when reading FITS headers from multiple NDFs in a container has been fixed. - The behaviour of the spectral plot window can now be changed so that it no longer remains above the main window. To enable this option either start GAIA with -transient_spectralplot 1, or set this option in the "File->Startup options..." dialog (this makes the change permanent). Keoe Release ============ The most significant changes in this release are in cube handling. The toolbox is now much faster at image slicing and handles FITS cubes as well as NDF cubes. It also features an all new, built-in, real-time interactive spectral extraction display, which features point and region extraction. It also has new controls for creating channel map images and selecting ranges for baseline subtraction. On 64bit platforms cubes greater than 2Gb can be handled. As part of these cube handling updates, all the image analysis toolboxes now also work on cube slices. Spectral analysis features are provided by communication with SPLAT-VO, which works outside of GAIA. GAIA can now also interoperate with some PLASTIC enabled applications. Other major changes in this release are that the version of Skycat has been updated (after a long pause of five years) to 2.4.7, along with an update to using Tcl/Tk 8.4.11. Highlights of the change to Skycat 2.4.7 include a new feature for the display of MEFs, and groups of NDFs, as a single image. There are also many minor changes in this release of GAIA: - GAIA can now display in-line compressed images (such as RICE from WFCAM). These are converted into temporary files on the fly and can be used with all other tasks within GAIA. - The ESP toolbox now reports the mean count along the isophote and plots intensity profiles. - A rarely seen problem with foreign-file conversion deleting the input files has been fixed. - The object detection toolbox has been updated to work with SExtractor version 2.4.3. This includes Petrosian magnitudes and some windowed parameters. - The Second U.S. Naval Observatory CCD Astrograph Catalogue (UCAC2) has been added to the default list. Existing users will be prompted to remove the file $HOME/.skycat/skycat.cfg and re-start GAIA to make this available. - The 2MASS catalogue query now includes a minimum radius. This change will be included with the UCAC2 update. - The GAIAIMAGEPICK_DIR environment variable now selects default directory for Pick-Image toolbox log file. - The image slice now has a option to display the Y axis using a log scale. - The cube slice display toolbox now has options for continuously looping (including "rock-and-roll"). - The "Show all coordinates" toolbox now displays coordinates from systems with more than 2 axes. Finally in this release GAIA has undergone major changes in the way that it is built and distributed (it is now available in the Starlink CVS repository and uses an autotools based build system). During this change IRAF support has been dropped, although the IRAF support files are still available in the CVS repository. Long-term users should note that GAIA is no longer supported by the Starlink project, which has been terminated. Most of this new work has been carried out for the JAC Hawaii. If you want work on GAIA to continue then support it by contacting any current members of the PPARC Astronomy or Science committees and making your views known. If you have any comments or problems with GAIA then join the Starlink support group. Peter W. Draper (p.w.draper@durham.ac.uk) Previous release notes: ----------------------- Last official Starlink release: GAIA 2.8-0 - 04 November 2004 ============================================================= A major release of GAIA incorporating a new NDF cube handling facility. GAIA will now detect 3D input data (ideally in NDF format) and display slices along one of the extra dimensions. This may be animated. You can also create a new image that is a combination of images between a range of indices. The tool also shows the world coordinates along the extra dimensions. All displayed and created images can be processed like any other image, so you can perform photometry, region statistics etc. The following minor issues have also been fixed. - The astrometry tables now offer a button to project X,Y to RA,DEC to complement the reset projection of RA,DEC to X,Y. - Contouring toolbox bug fixed. If you entered an incorrect NDF name for the second image, the error was never recovered and GAIA had to be restarted. - GAIA has been relinked against AST to fix a problem when the presence of multiple possible astrometries in FITS headers causes the image scale to be incorrectly estimated. - Printing the "whole image" now works when repeated without exiting GAIA. - Incompatibilities in the WCS components of NDFs are now ignored (older versions of AST cannot read newer encodings). - A problem with coordinate readout coupling when using more than one interactive slice or XY profile is being used. - A error reading the CRPIX values in the blink/compare toolbox has been fixed. GAIA (2.7-5) ============ GAIA 2.7-5 incorporated two new automated astrometry toolboxes, a major re-write of the blink comparison toolbox and many changes and fixes. GAIA 2.7-5 offered two new toolboxes based on the Starlink AUTOASTROM program. These make it possible to provide a minimum of positional information (image centre and scale) and then fit an astrometric solution. They also make it possible, for the first time, to fit optical distortions. The new toolboxes are available at: Image-Analysis->Astrometry Calibration->Automatic position matching One is for simple use and the other for advanced use. The blink comparison toolbox was substantially upgraded in this release. New features are options to alignment to NDF origins or FITS CRPIX values. This gives much better behaviour when comparing images of different dimensions. Better performance (less flickering artifacts). The ability to drag images and enter image coordinate offsets. All images can now be viewed together or one-by-one as before. Images should now always scroll and the "Refresh" button has been removed. Other changes in 2.7-5 release: - Spitzer/SIRTF FITS headers, including the optical distortion, are now handled. - The NDF component chooser now allows the variance component to be displayed as expected. - A new default percentage autocut option has been added. - Shared memory segments under Solaris should now be better behaved. - The handling of byte images is changed so FITS BITPIX=8 are correctly interpreted as unsigned byte, not signed byte. This change mostly effects the XY profile and contouring toolboxes. - An attempt to clear old WCS information from images before saving is now made. - The "gaiadisp" command has been enhanced to load a list of images into GAIA. - An experimental tabbed interface has been produced to make it easier to view FITS MEF files. To try this out use the command: $GAIA_DIR/tabbedgaia - Long thin or tall images (2 pixels or more) now display a readout of positions. - The "$GAIA_DIR/pix2wcs" and "$GAIA_DIR/wcs2pix" scripts should be working again. - The "$GAIA_DIR/displaycat" command now creates fully functional catalogue windows (previous these did not include any GAIA specific changes). - The "-catalog" command-line option now accepts a list of catalogues to display immediately. - The polarimetry toolbox now correctly processes selection expressions when column names are short forms of other names (i.e. when P and PI, DP and DPI etc. are used). Previously an attempt to interpret $PI as $P would be made and subsequently fail. - Making name queries using the RedHat 9 build of GAIA failed completely, sometimes causing a core dump from a child process. This problem has now been resolved. - The interpretation of FITS -CAR projections is now a configuration option. Previously this was fixed at assuming that all Cartesian projections are simple linear mappings (this remains the default), ignoring the possibility of spherical rotations. Refer to the CarLin attribute of the AST (SUN/211) library for more about this change. - Various changes to grid overlays have been implemented. This now supports AST 3.2 super-script and sub-script, font and colour changes within a string. Fonts drawn on the overlay grid can now be scaled with image. Better matching of postscript font size to displayed size has also been implemented. A long term memory leak has been cured (only seen when drawing overlays). - A new configuration option "always_merge" controls if the primary header of any FITS files are merged with those of extension being viewed to create a full set of headers for creating a world coordinate system. By default this merging no longer occurs when the primary HDU contains a non dummy image. - Region statistics now also include values for the NDF variance component.