MissFITS 2.4 release

MissFITS V2.4.0 has been released! This version is mostly a bugfix release; MissFITS now works on Mac OS X.

More details can be found in the ChangeLog.

SCAMP 1.7.0 release

SCAMP V1.7.0 has been released! This version adds the following features:

• support for the GSC-2.3.2 and PPMX astrometric catalogues
• support for HTTP proxies in CDSclient queries (make sure you have the latest version of CDSclient installed, as well as wget),
• CFH12k and VIRCam .ahead focal plane models.
• critical bug fixed in the shear correction procedure of catalog matching (would compromise the matching of sources for wide field instruments in cases of strong differential refraction).

More details can be found in the ChangeLog.

STIFF 2.1 release

STIFF V2.1 has been released! This small update to STIFF 2.0 is now compatible with Mac OS X (thanks to E.Pietriga) and has a new COPY_HEADER option to include WCS information in the TIFF file. This makes it possible to load STIFF colour images converted to JPEG right into the Aladin sky atlas with full astrometric information (thanks to R.Barbá for the idea). More details can be found in the ChangeLog.

STIFF 2.0 release

STIFF V2.0 has been released! This version adds a wealth of new features:

• complete rewriting of the conversion engine, now based on libTIFF 4.0
  • BigTIFF support: manages arbitrary large images (64-bit system required),
  • lossy or lossless on-the-fly image compression,
  • 8 or 16-bit per component,
• New tiled multiresolution pyramidal TIFF output mode to create giant zoomable pictures for the web. Check out these examples streamed through the IIPImage server software,
• X,Y or XY image flipping options.
• 2-5× better performance than previous version on multi-core machines thanks to multithreaded conversion code and non-blocking calls to libTIFF. Sadly, the libTIFF library itself is not multithreaded,
• Built-in power-law, sRGB and ITU-R BT rec.709 gamma corrections,
• XML-VOTable metadata output, with user-friendly XSLT stylesheet provided.

More details can be found in the ChangeLog.

SCAMP 1.6.2 release

SCAMP V1.6.2 has been released! This version adds the following features:

• support for the UCAC-3 and SDSS-R7 astrometric catalogues (make sure you install the latest version of CDSclient),
• ability to generate merged catalogues of the detections used for calibration in ASCII, binary FITS or XML-VOTable format. Binary FITS merged catalogues can be reused as local reference catalogues.
• possibility to select astrometric references within a restricted magnitude range, thanks to the new ASTREFCATMAG_LIMITS configuration parameter,
• improved compatibility with recent versions (5.9.x) of PLplot (please check this post first and make sure you upgrade to the latest version).

More details can be found in the ChangeLog.

Edit: the compilation problem with gcc has been fixed (thanks to forum members cngeow and srwalker101 for having reported this bug).