There's a growing collection of software related to astronomy within the Center. This page is meant to provide a brief overview of what's available and how to access it from CIS Unix systems.

Astronomer's Proposal Tool (APT)

Published by the Space Telescope Institute, the APT allows you to develop collections of proposals for the Hubble Space Telescope. You should be familiar with the HST proposal process before using these tools; to that end, you might want to visit the HST pages at http://www.stsci.edu/ or the APT pages at http://apt.stsci.edu/

This kit contains multiple tools, but the two that you are most likely to use are

APT

The APT is a complete and integrated system for the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) proposal preparation, replacing the previous systems used for HST Phase I and Phase II Proposal preparation. (text taken from the APT website) Your account is already set up to use it, you simply run APT at your shell prompt and it'll bring the tool up.

VTT

The Visual Target Tracker allows you to select a target to visualize, whether with the Digitized Sky Survey (optical) or with another standard FITS image file that you provide. (text taken from the VTT help file) Like APT, your account is already set up to use this, simply run VTT at your shell prompt.

Starview

StarView is an astronomical database browser and research analysis tool. StarView has its own homepage at http://starview.stsci.edu/ that you might want to browse a bit before using it. Your account is set up already to run it, simply run StarView at your shell prompt.

Please take note: The APT tools are written in Java, and are very slow on even a high-end Blade system. This is something we have very little control over. I'm sorry to say, you'll just have to be patient as you use these tools.

Xceptional Ephemeris Tool (Xephem)

Image Reduction and Analysis Facility (IRAF)

Chandra X-Ray Data Reduction Tools (cxc)