NICTOOLS

The NICTOOLS package is a collection of cl scripts developed at ST-ECF by Wolfram Freudling. It contains a number of tasks to groups, process and co-add NICMOS direct and grism images. It was written to help the processing of NICMOS grism images AFTER they have been calibrated with the STScI pipeline calnica and BEFORE spectra are extracted with ST-ECF software NICMOSlook or calnicc. It is also useful for simple co-adding (shift and add) of direct images. INSTALLATION:

• 1. Download nictools_1.3.tar.gz (current version : ~64kB gzip compressed)

• 2. create a directory "nictools" in your IRAF startup directory and copy all files of the distributions into this directory.

• 3. add the following commands to your login.cl file:

  set nictools= home$nictools/

  task $nictools = nictools$nictools.cl

• 4. set the default image type in IRAF to FITS by adding this line to you login.cl file:

  set imtype= "fits"

• 5. include nictools$helpdb.mip into your helpdb variable, e.g.

  set helpdb= "lib$helpdb.mip,noao$lib/helpdb.mip,tables$lib/helpdb.mip,stsdas$lib/helpdb.mip,nictools$helpdb.mip"

• 6. start IRAF

• 7. Within IRAF, type

  nictools

  help nictools

The software is being developed at the Space Telescope - European Coordinating Facility.