Monitoring changes to the DR software

Yesterday I gave instructions on how to retrieve the newest version of the Starlink software but it may not always be clear to people what changes are being made to the software to decide whether you want to get an update. The source code repositories for the Starlink software and ORAC-DR have RSS feeds that you can monitor in your standard news feed reader (e.g. Google Reader). Click on the RSS icon in the URL bar for the Starlink repository and the ORAC-DR repository.

SCUBA-2 DR status report

We have been making some good progress with the data reduction software. Since hawaiki there have been updates to the flatfielding and an improvement in the code that detects working bolometers by comparing the common-mode signal. The down side of all this work is that for people getting their data from shared-risks observing they need to be using the cutting-edge version of SMURF and not the hawaiki version. The switch of flatfielding technique actually means that hawaiki will not generate a reasonable map at all using hawaiki SMURF.

To get the latest version of SMURF there are a number of options:

• Use rsync to get a version for Centos5.4 (aka Scientific Linux 5.4 or RedHat Enterprise Linux 5.4) for either 32- or 64-bit linux. We attempt to keep these builds up to date. To see just how new you can run "$STARLINK_DIR/Perl/bin/starversion" and look at the date.
• I can periodically make available 64-bit OSX Snow Leopard starlink releases. Check this directory periodically.
• Download the source code and build it yourself (instructions on the Starlink home page)

As of 20100223 we have modified data acquisition to include a fast flatfield "ramp" at the start and end of every observation. These provide a direct calibration and should be more accurate than doing standalone flatfield observations as we have done previously (and continue to do). SMURF can not support these ramps at the moment but I am working on the issue. When the new code is working we will re-process the data from 20100223 at CADC.