Mark IV reduction pipeline -- first complete release

[Stupendous Man <richmond@a188-l009.rit.edu>]

  I've been working for the past few months on a pipeline for
turning a CD-Rom of Mark IV images into a small set of ASCII
text files with measured stellar positions and magnitudes.
This is my second "release" of the pipeline software.   It should
be possible for people to download, install, and actually use
the pipeline to reduce Mark IV images.

  What I'd like interested parties to do is to try to download one
or more of the packages, and tell me

        a) could you download the packages?
        b) could you un-gzip and un-tar the packages?
        c) could you compile and build the packages?

  And, for those with either a copy of the Mark IV "Data Disk 15",
or a fast Internet connection,

        d) were you able to run the pipeline on a subset of the
	      Data Disk 15 images?

  Only one of the pieces (the "match" package) has a self-test built
into it, alas.  So it won't be obvious if the software will run
properly on your system, even if it does compile and link.  But
I'll bet you can help me to find errors and warnings in the process
of trying to build the software, so I can fix them.

  If you're interested, it will take a computer running Linux or
some *nix-like operating system, with an ANSI C compiler.  One
of the packages uses the X Window system for a small fraction of
its programs.  Another package uses a open-source mathematical
library called "ccmath", which until this afternoon was available
via Freshmeat.org (but its homepage has disappeared since then,
it appears -- temporarily, I hope).

  You can find a description of the several packages, and the
main TCL pipeline itself, at

       http://spiff.rit.edu/tass/pipeline/pipeline.html

  I have created a subset of the images on Data Disk 15, on which
I have tested the pipeline.  All the parameter values are tuned for
this data (or, at least, are reasonable).  My "testbed" consists
of 32 images: 16 V-band and 16 I-band.  There are 4 darks for
each camera, and 3 "fields".  Each field has 4 images in each
camera, 2 short (15-second) and 2 long (150-second) exposures.
The data is available for download at

       http://spiff.rit.edu/tass/input/

Look at the "readme.txt" and "make_list.out" files for some description
of the individual images.

  In the 

       http://spiff.rit.edu/tass/pipeline/pipeline.html

document, see the "Incredibly Brief Cookbook" section for the steps
one must take to set up and use the pipeline on the test data.

  If you do manage to run the pipeline on the 32 testbed images,
see if you find the same photometric solution for the night that
I do.  The contents of the file "M1659_830.coeff" look this this:

V=V,(V-I)  N    129  a  -8.343  0.076  b   0.135  0.072   RMS  0.131 
I=I,(I-V)  N    197  a  -7.750  0.047  b   0.074  0.042   RMS  0.134 

(which means that Tom's Mark IV unit has mild color term in V and
small one in I).

  Please send me feedback, suggestions, bug reports.  I know that
there's a long way to go before all this software is packaged
properly.

                                      Michael Richmond