new version of XVista now available

[Michael Richmond <richmond@stupendous.cis.rit.edu>]

  Well, let me help to wake us up.  Driven by a class I'm teaching
this quarter, I've made a pretty big change to the "xvista" image
processing package (which is part of the TASS Mark IV data reduction
suite).  The image-display portions of the package will now run
properly on 24-bit displays.  The old version required an 8-bit display.

  Some 24-bit displays have fixed colormaps, so that one can't
modify the contrast of an image simply and quickly, but at least
one can display it, zoom in, measure a (row, col) position or
instrumental magnitude interactively, etc.

  You can find the new version (0.1.4) listed at

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

One must, as before,

             download the tarball
             gunzip
             untar
             read INSTALL
             ./configure
             make

and read the README and other (minimal) documentation.

  I've found that this version works not only under my local
flavors of Linux, but also under Mac OS 10.4, if one has
both the Apple version of X11 and the development kit with
compilers.  

  Bug reports are welcome.

                                     Michael