IRAF on NICS-managed machines at UCO/Lick Observatory

IRAF is the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility produced by NOAO.
IRAF is installed on Linux and Solaris machines managed by NICS.

Questions

Please send all questions about the local installation of IRAF at UCO/Lick Observatory to the user iraf. That address is an alias which will expand to the local maintainers of the IRAF installation.

Getting Started

The quickest way to get started using IRAF at UCO/Lick is to use the command
lmkiraf
This command will prepare a user account to run IRAF by creating a login directory in a default location.
The lmkiraf script provides advice during the setup process.
Note that the advice includes description of some changes which must be made manually by the user.

If the user account was previously configured to run an older version of IRAF then the older configuration will be preserved intact under a version-specific name.

Power users of IRAF may set up multiple alternate login directories for any of the versions of IRAF which have been supported at UCO/Lick.

Note that there have been some difficulties due to race issues for user accounts where the iraf home directory is NFS-mounted from a different machine. In such cases it is advisable to move the iraf login directory onto a local disk.

External Packages

The UCO/Lick installation of IRAF includes a number of external packages. More external packages can be added upon request.

PyRAF

The UCO/Lick installation of IRAF includes the Python-based PyRAF environment from Space Telescope Science Institute.
The first step is to set up a user account to run the IRAF cl. PyRAF should be accessible to anyone after IRAF itself is set up and included in the command search path of a user account.
iraf at ucolick dot org