"Production Level" of Mark IV pipeline ready to go

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

  Tom has brought the Mark IV hardware to the starting line,
so it's ready to go.  I believe I've done the same with the 
Mark IV pipeline.  A summary of the recent changes:

       - photometric calibration now ignores saturated stars
               (this actually a change to the "photom" program)

       - more information is now stored in the "make_list.out"
               file: fwhm, photometric zeropoint and color term.
               This information is updated as the pipeline runs.
               At the end of all processing, a copy of this file
               is made and given a name very much like the 
               main output file (the .cal list of calibrated 
               positions and magnitudes).  Thus, it should be
               easy to keep together the output of a night's run
               and a record of image properties for that night.

               Eventually, I should write some routines to make
               diagnostic plots based on this information, which
               would tell one at a glance "the night was good/bad".

       - the raw images have approximate values for RA and Dec written
               into the header.  The pipeline solves for more accurate
               central positions in the "do_astrom" step.  The new
               positions are now written into the FITS header of the
               cleaned images, so that intelligent image display
               programs may show approximate (RA, Dec) values based
               on the cursor position.

       - the sky-subtraction routines are more robust
         
       - one can specify different characteristics (readnoise, gain)
               for the V and I cameras; one can also specify different
               limits on the properties of stars, and use different
               aperture sizes to measure their properties

  The documentation is now in step with the code.  One can find it
all at the usual place:

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

The date given in the CHANGES and "pipeline.html" files is Apr 12, 2003.

  I've run this software on my suite of 7x7 grid images from DS24,
and it yields sensible results.  If other people want to use this
same set of input to test the software, you can find it at

                http://spiff.rit.edu/tass/ds24/

Beware!  The total volume of raw input images is about 1.5 GB, so
it may take a while to download.  

  I've been using the same "small" version of the Tycho2 reference catalog
for both astrometric and photometric calibration.  It may not have
enough stars to yield a good astrometric solution in some areas of the
sky, in which case one might have to switch manually to using a
"large" version for the astrometric step (but then switch back
to the "small" version for the photometric step).  You can find
both versions described in the photometric pipeline document:

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

which also provides URLs where you can download the two versions.

  One of the first things I should do in a future version is
modify the pipeline so that it can handle two _different_ catalogs,
one for astrometry and a second for photometry.  

  Those who are currently using the pipeline should note that 
most of the .param files are the same as always.  However, there
are several which have changed, and must be merged with your
current versions.

             astrom.param           has a new param
             make_list.param        lists two new fields
             photom.param           uses nominal coeffs for differential
                                          extinction by default
             
             sky.param              two new params
             stars.param            many params now come in keyed lists
                                          so that one must provide
                                          values for V and for I individually

  Questions?  Problems?  Please let me know.

                                              Michael Richmond