CHANDRA ELECTRONIC ANNOUNCEMENT NUMBER 79

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Contents: 

Contents:

1.  Chandra Cycle 14 Call for Proposals released 15 December 2011
2.  CIAO 4.4 and CALDB 4.4.7 released 15 December 2011

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Item 1: Chandra Cycle 14 Call for Proposals released 15 December 2011
==============================================================


The CXC is pleased to announce the release of the Chandra Cycle 14
Call for Proposals (CfP). The Call for Proposals, the Proposers'
Observatory Guide (POG), proposal planning software, and general
information are posted on the "Proposer" web page at the CXC website:

http://cxc.harvard.edu/proposer/

Proposals are due: 15 March 2012

Hardcopy documents are available on request to the CXC HelpDesk
(http://cxc.harvard.edu/helpdesk).



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Item 2: CIAO 4.4 and CALDB 4.4.7 released 15 December 2011
==================================================

The Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) is pleased to announce that version 4.4
of CIAO ("Chandra Interactive Analysis of Observations") and version
4.4.7 of CALDB ("Calibration Database") are available for download from:
http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/download/

Notable changes and improvements in CIAO 4.4:

* The new acis_find_afterglow identifies cosmic-ray afterglows and hot
pixels for TIMED mode observations. This tool should be used in place
of acis_run_hotpix for all analyses.  This tool improves over previous
algorithms by identifying shorter afterglows with possibly larger gaps
between frames. The chandra_repro script has been updated to use the
new tool.

* The wavdetect tool takes an observation-specific PSF map file -
created by mkpsfmap - instead of using the Chandra PSF table data or
the tool's internal parameterization of the ROSAT PSF.

* The addresp tool has been updated to combine grating response files
and to create output RSP files. The new functionality is available via
the combine_spectra script as well.

* An updated asphist algorithm uses the full tangent plane offset
computations and to correct angle between pointing and North. Both of
these affect data that have been reprojected to different tangent
points and/or multi-obi observations with significantly different
pointings.

* The ChIPS graphical user interface (GUI) allows users to adjust the
layout of their plots and make edits to many of the plot properties. A
Python terminal is built into the GUI, allowing access to ChIPS and
other Python commands. The GUI is available to any process that
creates a ChIPS plot, such as Sherpa and Prism.

* Bayesian Analysis with pyBLoCXS: the pyBLoCXS module is now
integrated into Sherpa. pyBLoCXS is a sophisticated Markov chain Monte
Carlo (MCMC) based algorithm designed to carry out Bayesian Low-Count
X-ray Spectral (BLoCXS) analysis in the Sherpa environment.

* Fitting Template Models to 1D Data: Sherpa supports a new template
model (an extension of table model). Sherpa can now read in a
collection of templates from a directory full of template files, and
can compare a data set to all the templates in that collection.

* The Monte Carlo optimization method has been significantly improved,
and can now find more reasonable parameter values in cases where it
formerly came up against parameter limits. The LMDIF optimization
method has also been updated to avoid getting "stuck" at the parameter
space boundaries for certain cases.

Read the complete CIAO 4.4 release notes, including the section "How
CIAO 4.4 and CALDB 4.4.7 Affect Your Analysis" at:
http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/releasenotes/ciao_4.4_release.html

---------------------------------

CIAO 4.4 is distributed for the following platforms:

* Linux 32-bit and 64-bit
* Mac OS X Intel 10.6 (Snow Leopard) and 10.7 (Lion) 32-bit and 64-bit

More details at http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/download/platforms.html

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In tandem with CIAO 4.4 is the release of the Chandra Calibration
Database version 4.4.7.

The CalDB 4.4.7 upgrade is a cumulative upgrade to CalDB 4.3.x and
requires CIAO 4.3 or later version.

CalDB 4.4.7 includes the following new items:

ACIS T_GAIN Epoch 47
HRC-I GMAPS 2010, 2011
HRC-I PIGBSPEC 2010, 2011
HRC-S Quantum Efficiency Version 11
PIMMS Cycle 14 Effective Areas
HETG Grating Efficiency (GREFF) version N0007

Detailed information can be found in the Chandra
Calibration Database website at http://cxc.harvard.edu/caldb/

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As always please send questions and requests for enhancements to the
CXC HELPDESK (http://cxc.harvard.edu/helpdesk/).

CIAO 4.4 is a collaborative effort between the SAO/CXC Science Data
Systems, the SAO/CXC Data Systems, and MIT/CXC personnel.

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