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Overview

General radio astronomical processing

AIPS++ provides facilities for calibration, editing, image formation, image enhancement, and analysis of images and other astronomical data. A major focus is on reduction of data from both single-dish and aperture synthesis radio telescopes. Although the tools provided in AIPS++ are mainly designed for processing data from varieties of radio telescopes, the package is expected to also be useful for processing other types of astronomical data and images.

Tool-based approach

AIPS++ has been designed to be tool-based and potentially programmable by the user. This means that terminology and the look and feel of AIPS++ is somewhat different from other astronomical processing packages. However, after a little bit of getting used to, you will find that most of the tools and applications that an astronomer is looking for (and hopefully many more) are available.

Access to all data

In AIPS++, the user has direct access to all portions of a data set or an image. Therefore, all aspects of the data can be manipulated at will using either existing applications in AIPS++, or user developed applications, or simply using calculator-type commands from the terminal.

Graphical Interfaces

AIPS++ is designed to take advantage of modern computer software and hardware. Mouse-driven Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are used extensively for handling various applications, computations, and image display.

Web-based documentation

In order to access the extensive AIPS++ reference material and other documentation, the Help menu that appears on most GUIs can directly steer a Web browser to the appropriate section. For those of you who are more comfortable with a type-on-terminal approach, AIPS++ can be completely controlled from the Command Line window. A combination of both Command Line window and GUI windows is probably most appropriate.

Powerful interactive command language

The command language used in AIPS++ is called Glish. This is a very capable interactive programming language which allows high level operations on vectors and arrays. All data can be accessed and manipulated from Glish and placed back into AIPS++. Tasks in AIPS++ are written in C++ for efficiency and bound to Glish, therefore, all capabilities of interest to the user are controllable from the Glish Command Line window.