[daip] single dish data

[Eric Greisen]

Siow-Wang Lee writes:

 > 1) How does one transport plot files together with images? I've 
 >    recently changed to a new computer and have transported all the 
 >    image files via FITTP, but I can't transport the associated
 >    PL files. Simply copying the PLD00?00?.* files to the new DATA 
 >    directory doesn't seem to work even though the catalog structure
 >    is identical to that in the old computer.

   Unfortunately, PL files do not have a structure that can be
transported via FITS tables.  Before I suggest a possible solution,
let me ask the critical question: is one of the computers involved a
SUN computer (or IBM, SGI) and the other a PC (or DEC alpha)?  If so,
the binary formats of the two are incompatible and simple file copying
will not work.  I actually assume that this must be the case or you
would not have bothered with FITTP.

If they do have compatible byte order, then you could have copied the
entire data area from one computer to the other (cp *.* .) which is a
lot easier than FITTP.  If the byte order is compatible, create
additional data areas on the new computer and copy the old data - to
get just the plots all you have to copy are CA*, CB*, PL* whcih are
the catalogs, the headers, and the plots.

 > 2) Can other single-dish data besides the 12m be imported into aips?
 >    I have IRAM 30m spectra which I would like to make into an image 
 >    cube (ra-dec-vel) using aips. Can it be done? 
 > 

Unfortunately (don't you hate things that start that way?), the
importation of data requires some sort of format translation.  I
personally wrote complex routines to read the 12m data, but have no
knowledge of the formats now used for the 30m of IRAM or, for that
matter, NRAO's new GBT.  The single-dish community has shown little
interest in the AIPS SD capabilities so I have not pursued the matter.
(I am the last general-purpose programmer in the group and I do
systems stuff a lot of the time.)  It is too bad in a way because AIPS
is well geared to large data set problems while most SD software
handles small problems with great flexibility but bogs down on big
problems.

Eric Greisen