What's New for CIAO 4.0

23 Jun 2008

CALDB 3.4.5 has been released for use with CIAO 3.4 and CIAO 4.0.

Information on the patch is available from the CALDB 3.4.5 Release Notes and How CALDB 3.4.5 Affects Your Analysis.

Download CALDB 3.4.5

04 June 2008

The CXC announces the return of the Chandra/CIAO workshops. This is the sixth in a series of workshops started in 2001 aimed at helping users to work with the Chandra Interactive Analysis of Observations (CIAO) software.

The 6th Chandra/CIAO Workshop will be held 20-22 October 2008 at the Chandra X-ray Center in Cambridge, MA (USA). Registration is now open!

15 May 2008

The Fitting FITS Image Data Sherpa thread has been updated for Sherpa Beta.

16 Apr 2008

Source Detection and Cosmic-Ray Afterglows

CIAO users who are trying to detect sources of about 10 counts or less should be aware of potential confusion with cosmic-ray afterglows that have not been removed from the data.

The Cosmic-Ray Afterglows why topic explains the limitations of the current tools and describes analysis tips to help eliminate more of the afterglows.

16 Apr 2008

CIAO has been patched to CIAO 4.0.2.

The CIAO 4.0.2 patch enables CIAO to run on Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) Intel. The patch is optional for 10.4 (Tiger) Intel machines.

The patch should not be applied to Linux, Solaris, or Mac PowerPC installations of CIAO.

Download the 4.0.2 patch.

Additionally, there is an updated standalone version of ObsVis for Mac OS X Intel; see the ObsVis website for details and the download.

16 Apr 2008

Mac OS X platforms: FITS table file writing slowness with NFS-mounted disks.

FITS table file writing through the CXC Data Model slows by a significant factor on Mac OS X machines - both 10.4 (Tiger) and 10.5 (Leopard) - when the data is accessed via a networked file system (NFS) mount. This issue does not affect Solaris or Linux platforms.

31 Mar 2008

CALDB 3.4.3 has been released for use with CIAO 3.4 and CIAO 4.0.

Information on the patch is available from the CALDB 3.4.3 Release Notes and How CALDB 3.4.3 Affects Your Analysis.

Download CALDB 3.4.3

12 Mar 2008

Three significant issues have been identified in the CIAO 4.0 version of wavdetect. Refer to the bug page for details:

• The falsesrc parameter should be left at the default value
• The lower limit on the sigthresh value is 1e-8
• Limitations in the PSF information

22 Feb 2008

CIAO 4.0 has been patched to CIAO 4.0.1.

The CIAO 4.0.1 patch contains improvements to the proposal-planning tool ObsVis, such as support for creating grids of fields-of-view. The patch is available from the Downloading CIAO page.

Additionally, there is a standalone version of ObsVis that does not require CIAO be available on the user's system. The standalone ObsVis is available for download from the ObsVis website.

10 Jan 2008

Some example test programs from OpenMotif were inadvertently included in the CIAO distribution for the FC4, OS X Intel, and OS X PPC platforms. Solaris and FC7 are not impacted. If a user has started CIAO and calls a tool with the same name as one of these programs - e.g. the Unix utility column - the OpenMotif program is run instead.

The "tools" binary tarfile for each of the three affected platforms has been remade to remove those programs. The new tarfiles are now available from the CIAO download pages.

It is not necessary to reinstall CIAO if you have already upgraded to CIAO 4.0. If you are concerned about this issue, please email the CXC Helpdesk and we will provide a script to remove the OpenMotif programs.

14 Dec 2007

The CIAO 4.0 software release is now available.

CIAO 4.0 is a full installation of the CIAO software, including ChIPS and Sherpa (Beta). Refer to the release notes for full details.

14 Dec 2007

CALDB 3.4.2 has been released for use with CIAO 3.4 and CIAO 4.0.

Information on the patch is available from the CALDB 3.4.2 Release Notes and How CIAO 4.0 and CALDB 3.4.2 Affect Your Analysis.

Download CALDB 3.4.2