Using the VM

  • Start DS9 (or ximtool) & PyRAF in your VM session:

    ds9 &
cd iraf
pyraf
gemini

  • You may then continue processing data as usual. All the IRAF packages from Astroconda are available, along with emacs & vi.

    Warning

    Don’t work in vm_transfer; use it for transferring input/output files.

    When working in the directory shared with the host machine (eg. vm_transfer), a problem has been observed where certain IRAF tasks (including gdisplay) appear to run normally but only process one image extension per file, or one of several files, producing incomplete output. You should therefore work in another directory under /home/irafuser (so that temporary files get written there), but you can still keep input & output files in vm_transfer and point the rawpath parameter of the appropriate IRAF tasks there, in order to find them.

  • You can also use DRAGONS (and other conda packages), but it is recommended that you instead do that directly on the host machine where possible, as you are more likely to run into resource limitations on the VM. Only the IRAF packages in Astroconda require a 32-bit VM on MacOS >=10.15.

  • You should be able to administer the conda packages installed in /home/irafuser/anaconda2 as usual. The operating system (CentOS 7) installation is not intended to be user-maintainable.