NOAO pioneered the development of robust, versatile astronomical software, leading to the development of IRAF, the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility in the 1980s. IRAF is still widely used and is updated and maintained by NOAO. The new era of data mining and the virtual observatory has motivated an extension of NOAO’s software efforts to include automatic data reduction pipelines as well as online access to archived raw and reduced data and uniform datasets from our survey program.

NOAO Data Archives

All raw data from NOAO telescopes and instruments, and from NOAO observing programs on telescopes operated by the WIYN, SOAR, and SMARTS consortia are available when their proprietary periods have expired. In addition, data from the CCD Mosaic Imagers, NEWFIRM, and DECam are pipeline-reduced and made available. Uniform data sets from NOAO Surveys can be found in the NOAO data archives as well.

Software

NOAO developed IRAF, the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility, and continues to maintain and update it. A large number of external packages to perform more sophisticated processing or reduce data from specific instruments can also be downloaded. IRAF has been used to create automatic data reduction pipelines for several instruments on NOAO telescopes.

Documentation

NOAO provides documentation that ranges from general guides on reducing astronomical data of various types to specific manuals for unique instruments.

Other NOAO data

Access the NOAO Deep Wide Field Survey, various NOAO spectral atlases, KPNO and CTIO photographic plate logs, and other miscellaneous data.