ELSA version 1.0b1 - General Notes ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ website: http://www.williams.edu/astronomy/research/PN/ELSA This file contains a few brief notes on this release of ELSA. Documentation ------------- Full documentation on all scientific and operative aspects of ELSA is contained in the file "documentation.pdf" included in this distribution. The documentation is also available on the ELSA website in PDF and HTML form. Also included is a text file called "TASKS" which contains a list of various tasks, their syntax, and what they do. We recommend you refer first to the official documentation. Compiling --------- Compilation should be fairly straightforward for those familiar with typical Unix applications. You should be fine to do: cd src make This will produce an "elsa" binary one level up from "src". If for some reason the makefile does not work for you, you can also do: cd src gcc -o elsa -O -g *.c -lm mv elsa ../elsa If you have compilation problems, please contact me (mdjohnson@wesleyan.edu) and tell me in excruciating detail what sort of system you're on and what the suspected problem is. We develop and test ELSA on Mac OS X and, to a lesser extent, Solaris. It should be smooth sailing on both of those platforms. Known Issues ------------ The biggest caveat for this release is that the abundances calculations are unreasonably sensitive to slight changes in initial conditions (for example, which value of the Boltzmann constant is hardcoded into the program). We plan to remedy this by introducing arbitrary precision math into the "chi5L" function in pne_abun.c. This issue should be addressed in the next release. Name Change ----------- Up until about 4 days before the January 2006 AAS meeting, ELSA was known internally as "PNE". We decided to change the name to (E)mission (L)ine (S)pectrum (A)nalyzer because the software could be used on objects other than planetary nebulae (although that was the genesis of the project), and because "PNe" is already used as a shorthand for planetary nebulae (hence the original name of the project). Needless to say, various permutation of "pne" abound throughout the source code. We apologize for any confusion this causes (particularly since "PNE" is how we refered to the program in the abstract which was printed in the AAS meeting bulletin). A more thorough job of changing the naming conventions will be done in future releases. Feedback -------- We are very anxious to hear any feedback from researchers who use this tool. Any suggestions, problems, or comments are greatly appreciated. The authors may be contacted at the following email addresses: Matt Johnson mdjohnson@wesleyan.edu Jesse Levitt Jesse.S.Levitt@williams.edu Dick Henry henry@nhn.ou.edu Karen Kwitter Karen.B.Kwitter@williams.edu