Some useful astronomical links

Software

IRAF (STSDAS and PROS)
The most widely used astronomical reduction and analysis package is IRAF. It is available at NOAO (http://www.noao.edu/iraf/). Other packages, like STSDAS or PROS, with tasks tailored for specific reductions and analysis run under the IRAF kernel. Ports or IRAF exist, among others, for UNIX and Linux.


ASDS
The Astronomical Software Directory Service (http://asds.stsci.edu/asds/) is a collection of software-related documents and the means for performing full-text searches on them.
This collection is made of the

• high level package descriptions
  
• on-line documentation

Users can browse the contents or list their software in the ASDS.

Another listing of software packages and utilities is provided by SEDS. (http://www.seds.org/billa/astrosoftware.html)

Starlink
Selected packages are available on-line at the Starlink Software Store (http://star-www.rl.ac.uk). The distribution method is changing as the primary method will be by CD-ROM instead.

Software-related publications
The latest software developments are usually presented at the Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) conferences. Its proceedings are published by the ASP. Another series were the ESO ST-ECF Data Analysis conferences whose proceedings were published by ESO.

IDL
The Interactive Data Language (IDL) developed by RSI (http://www.rsinc.com) is widely used for reduction and analysis. It is a commercial package with ports to many systems from laptops to workstations.

Linux for astronomy
The Random Factory (http://home.earthlink.net/~rfactory/lfa.html) publishes a CD-ROM with a collection of the most popular reduction and analysis astronomical software that run under the Linux operating system.
The packages include:

• AIPS and MIRIAD for radioastronomy
  
• IRAF and MIDAS
  
• GIPSY and Karma for image processing
  
• PGPLOT/PGPERL for plotting and visualization
  
• NEMO for stellar dynamics simulations
  
• SAOImage and SAOtng for image display
  
• StarBase an astronomy database
  

Some basic statistics computations are available in the STSDAS' ttools and statistics packages. More serious techniques, like multivariate analysis can be found in the Statistical Consulting Center for Astronomy
(http://www/stat.psu.edu/scca). This site, besides being the portal to a service for statistical queries includes also links to code (http://www/stat.psu.edu/statcodes)