[fitsbits] Hera data analysis facility

[William Pence]

This is to announce the opening of the Hera data analysis facility at the
HEASARC for general public use.  Hera provides pre-installed software
packages, local disk space, and computing resources needed to do general
processing of FITS format data files residing on the user's local computer
or on the user's temporary disk area on the Hera servers, and to do advanced
research using publicly available scientific data from high-energy
astrophysics missions. Researchers, students, and educators may freely use
the Hera services over the Internet for research and educational purposes.

Full information about Hera can be found at
http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/hera/.  A brief summary is given below:

Three different user interfaces to Hera are currently provided:

* run individual tasks from a command line window on your desktop to analyze
   local FITS data files (just as if the software were installed on your
   local machine), or

* use a graphical user interface to control the execution of different
   software tasks and manage your files on both the Hera server and on your
   local machine, or

* select any data set in the HEASARC data archive using your web browser,
   and then click on the associated 'Hera' link to instantly start analyzing
   that particular data set on the Hera servers.

The Hera software includes general utility programs for processing and
manipulating any FITS image or table, as well as hundreds of more
specialized programs for analyzing data from high-energy astrophysics
missions.  The available software includes most of the programs in the
HEASARC FTOOLS and the Chandra CIAO data analysis packages, as well as
several of the most frequently used programs in the XMM-Newton SAS package.

In order to access the Hera services, users only need to install the small
Fv FITS file editor program on their local machine;  Fv serves as the
communications portal to the Hera servers at the HEASARC.

Examples of using the Hera command line interface to run some of the general
FITS file analysis tools are shown below.  Each task is run the same as if
the software were installed locally, by specifying the name of the task on
the Unix command line, followed by the values of the task parameters. The
only difference is that the entire command is prefaced with the string
"fv -r". The Hera interface transparently copies any input data files
to a temporary disk area on the Hera server, runs the task, and then copies
any output text and data files back to your local computer.

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1.  Get a short description of all the tasks in the "heatools" package:

     fv -r fhelp heatools

2.  Get detailed help on using any individual task (ftlist in this case):

     fv -r fhelp ftlist

3.  Get a 1-line summary of each HDU in a FITS file:

     fv -r ftlist inputfile.fits hc

4.  Same as above, but also list all the keywords in the FITS file:

     fv -r ftlist inputfile.fits hck

5.  Compute statistics about any FITS image or table:

     fv -r ftstat inputfile.fits

6.  Sort the 'rate' table extension in the input FITS file 'inputtable.fits'
     on the TIME column, creating the new output FITS file 'outtable.fits'

     fv -r ftsort 'inputtable.fits[rate]' outtable.fits time

7.  Use the general fimgcalc image calculator task to subtract a bias frame
     from the input image and divide the result by a flatfield image (where
     the input image, the bias image, and the flatfield image are called
     rawimage.fits, bias.fits, and flat.fits, respectively). The result is
     written to the 'outimage.fits' output file.

     fv -r ftimgcalc outimage.fits '(A-B)/C' A=rawimage.fits B=bias.fits
          C=flat.fits

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