Hello chandra-users,
The CIAO team has released an update to the CIAO contributed science
tarfile. The new tarfile may be downloaded via ciao-install
(http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/download/) or from the CIAO Contributed
Scrips Page (http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/download/scripts/).
The main reason for this update is to release the find_chandra_obsid
script - as it can be helpful when planning a Chandra proposal, and the
release date is approaching way too rapidly - but there are also several
minor updates and improvements.
The changes in this release are described at
http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/news.html#item-2012-02-16
and included below.
Good luck with your proposals,
Doug Burke, for the CIAO team
---------------------------------------------
o) The find_chandra_obsid script lets you search the publicly-available
Chandra observations by position (RA and Dec, J2000) or name (using the
CADC name resolver). It is a command-line wrapper for the Chandra
Footprint Service.
A list of matching observations, including relevant information is
returned, or the data can be directly downloaded from the archive
(download_chandra_obsid can also be used). Examples:
unix% find_chandra_obsid 'ngc 1333'
unix% find_chandra_obsid 12:45:32 -32:30:10
unix% find_chandra_obsid 350.86 58.81 download=ask
The ciao_contrib.runtool module has been updated to include support for
find_chandra_obsid.
o) The combine_spectra script has been updated to:
works around a bug in addresp (no TLMIN4 keyword in the output RMF
file) so that combined RMF files can be used in Sherpa and X-Spec;
minor improvements to the handling of temporary files.
o) The fluximage script has been updated to:
support setting badpixfile=NONE if you wish to create an exposure
map with no bad pixels;
create all temporary files in the directory given by the tmpdir
parameter, so that the script can now be run from a directory in
which you do not have write permission;
add a COMMENT line to the headers of the files listing the version
of the script that was run (to aid in provenance tracking); for
instance:
unix% dmlist 0.5-7.0_2.3_bin8_flux.img header,clean,raw | grep COMMENT |
grep fluximage
COMMENT = fluximage version 14 February 2012 /
o) The specextract script has been updated so that it will not error out
if you set outroot to be a stack and had correct=yes and weight=no.
o) Two Python modules have been added to support finding
(ciao_contrib.cda.search) and downloading (ciao_contrib.cda.data)
publicly-available data in the Chandra Data Archive. These modules are
used by the find_chandra_obsid and download_chandra_obsid scripts.
o) Two Python modules have been added to support some common coordinate
tasks:
coords.resolver provides simple access to the CADC name resolver;
coords.format converts between many sexadecimal and decimal degree
formats for Right Ascension and Declination values.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Dec 13 2012 - 01:00:11 EST