Re: [alma-sw-ssr] Offline Requirements v3.1

[mel wright 456 <wright@astron.berkeley.edu>]

Hello Bryan,

	I guess I'm questioning whether ALMA should spend
a lot of money re-creating the things for which there are
apparently well liked and supported alternatives. For the
professional radio astronomer it would be nice to stay
within a custom environment, but for the optical/IR/etc
user it would be nice to use the package which they
are familiar with, and probably to analyse ALMA images
together with images from other instruments.

I understand that
"IDL and matlab (and cohorts) are *not* very good at the creation
of these images/spectral cubes (i.e., they are not good for "various
flavors of deconvolution and mosaicing")."

What I am suggesting is that the efficiently coded, radio-astronomy
specific algorithms could be provided with clean interfaces for
use (perhaps as externally called routines) from other packages
which the user might prefer to use. As Mark notes, using aips++
these algorithms are  "well-integrated with the data", but the
IR astronomer may wish to work in a more familiar environment,
better suited to data from some other instrument.

The scientific potential of ALMA will be best realised by
making it easy for a wide community of users to analyse the
data in a wide range of packages, rather that by forcing them
to use a specific custom built environment. A corrolary is
the algorithms developed by the radio astronomy
community may have application in other fields if they are
available in other packages.

	just a though,

			Melvyn