Tips 'n' Tricks

IRAF does not need to convert .fits files into the .imh and .pix. All operations can be carried out on the .fits itself.
Under login.cl change imtype to "fits,noinherit"

You can make postscript images of anything in the gterm window under the graphics cursor (big red crosshair)
Under login.cl change stdplot to "psdump"
Under the graphics cursor just hit the "=" button near backspace or use ":.snap"
The PS files show up by default under /tmp and are named irafdmpXXXXX.ps (X = integer)
ImageMagick can convert from PS to other file formats and rotate/resize.

You can enable the backspace key under xgterm.
Add "!stty erase ^H" to login.cl

PC-IRAF 2.11 had a problem finding the standard star catalog files.
epar the photcal param file (noao>digiphot>photcal) and change catdir to "photcal$catalogs/" from "photcalx$catalogs/"
Or upgrade IRAF. Or in any of the photcal tasks param files set catdir to "/iraf/iraf/noao/digiphot/photcal/catalogs/" if you installed IRAF normally.
The latter route is useful if you make new catalog files and put them in some other path.

If you are doing aperture photometry by hand then you can can have IRAF overlay your apertures on the images you display in ximtool/ds9.
To mark centers - epar centerpars and set mkcenter to yes
To draw the sky annuli - epar fitskypars and set mksky to yes
To draw photometric appertures - epar photpars and set mkapert to yes
And finally to enable graphics overlay (and get rid of that warning when you run phot) - epar phot and set display to imdb, imdg, imdy or imdr to get blue, green yellow or red overlay.
Click the image if you want to see what the overlays look like - the yellow ones were created with ds9.

The overlays are useful if you have to figure out what size aperture and annuli to pick to avoid significant overlap between objects. If you are doing asteroid photometry and it gets too close to a star in the frame, then its easy to see if you have the overlays enabled. We reject those frames as they tend to have colors that are wonky.

This seems to work fine if you display one frame at a time but the overlays sometimes end up on the worng frame if you display multiple frames in ds9.

This is pointless if you are using daofind to do automatic star finding and photometry. For that you can use tvmark to mark detections.


More when I get bored again (3rd AUG 2005).

Windows XP Installations bug

For the longest time (well ok three weeks) my computer (running stupid bloody Windows XP would claim)

"Cannot run Two Device Installations."

"You can install only one device at a time.Another device installation is under way,when it is finished you can try this wizard again."

I had to ferret this out from the deep dark corners of the internet and so decided to put it in a few more places for those of you suffering as I did. This solved the problem. Read on.

SOLUTION (yay)

Picked this up in another post:

"Under the Startup key, I deleted the
"FactoryPreInstallInProgress"=dword:00000001
or: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\SETUP
I also deleted the entire HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Factory key.
Once I completed these and rebooted, I was able to use the Hardware Wizard, the event entries did not show up, and in my case, the USB hard drive that I was attempting to use would mount using plug and play."

Use "regedit" (Start>Run>regedit) - it has a built in find function under the Edit menu. I take no personal credit for this. Whoever made this post originally thanks a bunch.
-Gautham