Table files

MIDAS table files are binary files, to save the considerable overhead of converting between ascii and the machine's internal binary representation of numbers. The price to be paid for fast response while reading a table is that tables are not transportable between different machines. This means that the standard tables have to be created on each new machine.

Fortunately, MIDAS also understands FITS formats, which are portable. Therefore, the tables of standard stars (and some other sample tables) are available as portable ascii files, and a script is provided to create the tables. The FITS files are (on a UNIX system) in the directory $MIDASHOME/calib/raw/pepsys, which contains several files with the suffix .mt. The directory $MIDASHOME/calib/install contains scripts for installing such files; the script you want is pepsys.prg. The local MIDAS guru should run this script to create the table files in $MIDASHOME/calib/data/pepsys. After running the script, please check the newly-created table files to make sure users can read them but not re-write or remove them.

If the ``calib'' directories and files are not part of your system, they can be obtained by ftp, or (if necessary) on magnetic tape.