Chandra Announcements: Version 4.13.1 of the CIAO Contributed Scripts and Modules package

[Tara Gokas]

Version 4.13.1 of the CIAO Contributed Scripts and Modules package (includes fix for "frame-store-shadow" bad pixels)

Version 4.13.1 of the CIAO Contributed Scripts and Modules package has been released (March 18, 2021). CIAO 4.13 users are strongly encouraged to update to this version of the contributed scripts (upgrade instructions are included below).

The release includes several updates, primarily to address the problem with the so-called "frame-store-shadow" bad pixels. 

The Caveats about ACIS Frame Store Shadow Bad Pixels explains in detail the issue - dating back to CIAO 4.12 -, how to check if a source is located near the affected area, shows examples and suggests workarounds while we work on updating the software. 

While the individual tools involved in computing the effective area (mkarf, mkinstmap, mkexpmap, mkgarf, mkwarf, dither_region) still need updating, the scripts which use these tools are updated in this ciao-contrib 4.13.1 release to correctly include the "shadow" bad pixels when creating responses. Note that this problem only affects sources located approximately within 5-8 pixels from the bottom edge of the ACIS CCDs. 

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What version of the contributed package do I have installed?

         The following command gives the installed version of the contributed package and the method of the CIAO installation:

             % ciaover -v | grep -i contrib

        For CIAO installations made with ciao-install the output will look like:

        Contrib : Package release 1  Thursday, March 18, 2021

        For conda installations the output will look like:

            ciao-contrib          4.13.1                 py_0 https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao

How do I upgrade (or install) the package? 

         For CIAO installed with the ciao-install script, the contributed package can be upgraded with the same script: please see http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/download/

         Users of the conda installation of CIAO 4.13 can update the contributed scripts package  by running:

       % conda update -n <env> -c https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/conda/ciao ciao-contrib

        where <env> is the name of the conda environment where CIAO is installed.  The enumerated version of the conda distribution of this update is 4.13.1.