Official Announcement of the 03FEBpl1.0 ESO-MIDAS Release
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The official 03FEBpl1.0 release of ESO-MIDAS has been released on February 28, 2003 and is available on our ftp accounts.

• What's new or upgraded in ESO-MIDAS 03FEB?
• Platform availability
• Source distribution of ESO-MIDAS 03FEBpl1.0
• ESO-MIDAS on a CD-ROM
• Technical Support and Network Services

What's new or upgraded in MIDAS 03FEBpl1.0?

All important enhancements, new developments and bugfixes can be found in the file /midas/03FEB/prim/help/news.alq and displayed in Midas via the command

Midas> help [News]

• Descriptor format

  Reading the old (very first) descriptor format of Midas, obsolete since 1993, is no longer supported from this release on. Always save your data as FITS files.

• FITS header for world coords

  The standard for representing world coord information in the header of a FITS file has changed. Instead of CDELTi and the PC matrix, only the CD matrix may (should) be given. The FITS I/O routines have been changed to calculate STEP, START of a Midas image from the CD matrix of the FITS header in case no FITS keyword CDELTi was found. When writing FITS files, Midas always writes the keyword CDELTi and updates the comment field of CDELTi to reflect the way how this value was obtained.

• VIEW/IMAGE

  The command has been upgraded to process correctly scaled images. Thus, you can load a big image with scaling factors into the display to get the global picture, and then via VIEW/IMAGE inspect sub-areas of the image in the zoom_window in the original detail. for details.

• GET/CURSOR

  The zoom_window option of this command has been upgraded to process also scaled images. Thus, you can load a big image with scaling factors into the display to get the global picture, and then select sub-areas of the image to load in the zoom_window in the original detail and use the cursor in there.

For details use the command: help [News] or click on [News] topic in the graphical user interface.

Platform availability

In our ftp area, the source version valid for all platforms mentioned above is available.

Source distribution

03FEBpl1.0 is available as source code.

For a proper installation of MIDAS sources follow the procedure of the installation document provided in PostScript (installunix.ps.Z) and .html format (installunix.html) ESO-MIDAS is a copyright protected software product of the European Southern Observatory, and provides general tools for image processing and data reduction.

As of the 95NOV release,patch level 2.0, ESO-MIDAS is available under the GNU General Public License. This means that the ESO-MIDAS system is available free of charge and can be freely redistributed on certain conditions.

ESO-MIDAS on a CD-ROM

The ESO-MIDAS CD-ROM will contain the release 03SEPplx.x and will include source code, binaries, documentation, and verification procedures.

Technical Support and Network Services

Technical support for ESO-MIDAS can be obtained using the ESO-MIDAS Helpdesk by filling out the ESO-MIDAS Problem Reporting Form

Please note, that ESO is not in the position to give active support to individual users outside research institutions neither to support ESO-MIDAS installations on PC/Linux systems. Also, as of the 95NOV release we have reduced the support for VMS and OpenVMS systems. Therefore, users who have problems or questions concerning ESO-MIDAS running on these systems are advised to use the "midas-users" mailing list for obtaining feedback and solutions to their questions from other users.

In case the ESO-MIDAS Problem Report System cannot be used the MIDAS User Support can be contacted via:

Electronic mail:	midas@eso.org
Telefax:	+49 89 32006480 (attn.: MIDAS Support)
Post:	Data Management and Operations Division - User Support Group Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2, D-85748 Garching bei Muenchen, Germany

Other public services:

Anonymous ftp:	ftp://ftphost.hq.eso.org/pub/midaspub
WWW:	http://www.eso.org/esomidas
Mailing lists:	midas-announce (for official announcements) midas-users (for general discussion)

To subscribe to these mailing lists, send a mail to majordomo@eso.org with the following command in the body of your email message: "subscribe midas-announce <email>", or "subscribe midas-users <email>", where <email> should be your e-mail address.

For your questions, comments, problems, etc, related to ESO-MIDAS, please use the ESO-MIDAS Problem Report Form.

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