The /contrib directory contain self-contained user-contributed packages
that are *not* part of the standard IDL Astronomy library distribution.

If a .tar file is present in a directory, then it contains all the necessary
procedures and README file, i.e. one can download either the .tar file *or* the
remaining ASCII files.

Currently (September 2000) contains

/beck -  Contains the neural network classifier procedure nnet.pro and
       training program train_nnet.pro and supporting procedures (Terry Beck,
       ACC, Inc., Goddard)

/bhill - An object-oriented display widget for roaming, zooming, scaling and
         examining pixel values in an image.   XCTV is for a single image,
         while XCTV2 is for examining 2 images simultaneously.   Requires V5.1
         or later.    Last updated 1 September 2000   (Robert Hill, Raytheon)

/freudenreich -  Contains ROBLIB, a set of mathematical and statistical 
    procedures for robust data analysis originally developed for the COBE 
    project by Henry Freudenreich (Hughes STX).    Includes procedures for
    LOWESS smoothing, bootstrap error analysis, robust regression, polynomial
    and quadratic surface fitting.   (Henry Freudenreich, Goddard)


/knight - Contains the single (large) widget image display program LOOK.PRO
          Last Modified: 12-Jul-2000:  (Fred Knight, Lincoln Labs)
          
          o You roam in a grid of 2x2 windows with menus on three sides.
          o The plots are dynamic: horizontal and vertical cuts are updated
            as you move the mouse over the full and zoom images.
          o Zoom by dragging the left mouse over the full image.
          o Select numerous options in the Options menu,
            - blink compare (between 2 or more images)
            - movies (all or selected images)
            - catalogs (all or selected images)
            - enlargements (to window and to entire screen)
            - plots (surface, shade_surf, show3, etc.)
            - regions of interest
            - spatial filters, and ...
          o Look is extensible: you can define
            - one loading function, and
            - procedures and functions for display and image processing, e.g.,
                look_fourier - to filter square images
                lego, image_cont, threed, etc. - any IDL pro using 2-D param
                roberts, sin, alog10, etc. - any IDL function using 2-D arg


/landsman - Contains the following two subdirectories. (Wayne Landsman,
Raytheon)

   /help  Contains the procedure MAN.PRO and supporting procedures
           MAN.PRO will emulate the old IDL online help facility available
           prior to IDL version 4.0.   For example,

    IDL> man,'rebin      ;Display help on intrinisic IDL REBIN function
    IDL> man,'hrebin     ;Display help on Astronomy Library HREBIN procedure
    IDL> man,'astron     ;Display all astronomy library procedures

    /v5    Contains the procedure idlv4_to_v5 and associated procedures to
    change subscripts in a procedure from parentheses to square brackets for
    compatibility with IDL V5.    Also, contains the procedure idl5to4.pro for
    converting the parentheses in a V5 procedure to V4 compatibility.

/malumuth - Contains the procedure TCTOOL and supporting procedures.  This is
    a Widget Tool which is useful in creating a "True Color" image, given a red,
    green, and blue image of the same field.    User has the ability to 
    interactively scale, rotate, shift, trim, and edit the three images to
    optimize the true-color image.    Requires a 24 bit graphics display.
    (Eliot Malumuth, Raytheon)

/markwardt - 
    Contains enhancements to the FX* procedures for FITS I/O available in the
    /fits_bintable directory of the IDL Astro Library.   These enhancements
    link the FX* software with C. Markwardt's "seekable pipe" package at 
    http://cow.physics.wisc.edu/~craigm/idl/io.html#FXGPKG)
    which allow one to read gzip'ed FITS files transparently under Unix. 

/offenberg - 
       Contains the single (long) program PUBPLOT written by Joel 
       Offenberg (Raytheon ITSS/Goddard).     This is an interactive widget 
       plotting program.   It is similar to PWIDGET but has additional 
       features such as allowing error bars.    A TeX file PUBPLOT.TEX
       is available describing all the features.   Last updated in February 96.
 

/rsilib - A duplicate copy of the IDL V5.2 procedure library, as provided in
      the standard IDL distribution.

/varosi - a set of procedures  written by Frank Varosi (Raytheon) dealing with
       mathematics, deconvolution and  mosaicing, and originally developed for
       processing images from infrared arrays.   ***Note that, unlike the other
       contrib directories, these routines are developed locally and maintained
       independently by F. Varosi (varosi@idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov) ****

*********************************************************

The /thompson directory is no longer available. 
    Prior to 3-Sep-1997, this directory contained four self-contained
    packages  originally developed by Bill Thompson (Applied Research
    Corporation) for the Solar EUV Rocket  Telescope and Spectrograph
    (SERTS).