Hi,
I had previously promised to write up something on how to use IRAF. It turns out that I'm not going to have time to do so no until near Christmas.
In the mean time people may like to read
The Zen of IRAF
-
irishastronomy.org mirror [1]
, written a little while back by my imaging supervisor. I've read through a lot of IRAF documentation, including some of the alleged beginner docs and this is by far the best.
He deals with its use for a particular project he was working on, so may not be to your needs exactly. In particular he deals with photometry rather than pretty image creation. However a project that I have done deals with using IRAF for making realistic pictures (with aladin and maximdl) which I can email to those interested [the project is likely to be given again so I don’t want to put it up online until its sufficiently obfuscated into a tutorial!]
He uses the Linux for astronomy cdrom as his source. Last time I looked this cd was very out of date and incompatible with new distros (don’t you love the Linux view of library compatibility...). Anyway I use Solaris and not Linux now so its useless for me! The software is available as a free download so no need to purchase anything unless you really want to. It is a little tricky to install if you are not familiar with UNIX, so if you have any problems please post and I'll either help or write a tutorial/script to do the job.
Apologies if this is a bitter disappointment to anyone! If there is demand I'll do a tutorial later in the year.
Cheers,
~Al
[1] since aavso seems down. I'll delete this eventually.
