IRAF is the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility, a general purpose software system for the reduction and analysis of astronomical data. IRAF was written by the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) in Tucson, Arizona. However, development and maintenance of IRAF is discontinued since 2013. The latest release had a large number of problems, including major license issues and security bugs.
To keep the software away from bitrotting, and to fix bugs that are in the package despite (or because) of its age, the iraf-community works on integrating the available patches into the IRAF source code.
For instructions to install from source see the file
INSTALL.md in this directory. Installation
instructions for binary packages on Linux or macOS can be found on the
Installation web page.
IRAF can only survive by the contribution of its users, so we welcome and encourage your contributions. The preferred way to report a bug is to create a new issue on the IRAF GitHub issue page. To contribute patches, we suggest to create a pull request on GitHub.
IRAF is licensed under a MIT style license -- see the file
COPYRIGHT. Detailed licensing information for third
party code may be found in the doc/LICENSES subdirectory. Note that
all non-free code from the book Numerical Recipes was removed.