Urania

Francesco Pierfederici and Nor Pirzkal have released a new version of Scisoft OSX for Intel which is available for download here. Here’s a quote from their blog about the changes:

This version is contains the latest STSDAS and TABLES Iraf packages as well as updates of a few packages.Startup scripts have also been modified to try to get around conflicts with Fink. Please let me know if you are still getting problems with Scisoft when Fink is installed.

I checked the list of packages included and changes that I was able to identify versus Scisoft OSX 2007.1.1 include:

• cfitsio 3.040 (previously 3.006)
• aXe 1.6 (previously 1.5.1)
• FV 4.4 (no previous version listed)
• Python 2.5.0 (previous 2.4.3)
  • ipython 0.8.1 (previously 0.7.2)
  • Numpy 1.0.3 (previous 1.0)
  • pyfits 1.1rc4 (no previous version)
  • matplotlib 0.90 (previously 0.87.7)
  • pygsl 0.9.1 (previously 0.3.2)
  • stsci_python 2.5 (previously 2.4)
  • MySQL-python 1.2.1_p2 (previously 1.2.1)
  • AstroAsciiData (no previous version)
  • scipy 0.5.2 (previous version 0.5.2.dev2320)
• IRAF Packages (WARNING: This version of Scisoft OSX doesn’t fix the missing symbolic links to mpkg and xc I noted earlier and you may want to manually fix those links.)
  • TABLES 3.7 (previous version 3.6)
  • STSDAS 3.7 (previous version 3.6)

The release notes warn if you use Aquaterm devices for PGPLOT, GNUPLOT, or any other packages that you “must manually run/scisoft/i386/Applications/Aquaterm.app once first to enable the aquaterm devices.

My standard way to install Scisoft OSX updates is to move my existing /scisoft directory to /scisoft_old and then I unpack the new version. That way, in case anything goes wrong, I can always switch back.