December 2006
This directory contains documentation for the procedures in the 
IDL Astronomy Library.

*.readme  -- these files duplicate the aaareadme.txt files in individual
	  subdirectories in the IDL Astronomy Library, and give a brief
	  description of the procedures in the directory.   For example,
	  astrom.readme describes the IDL procedure dealing with astrometry.

daophot.tex -- A LaTeX file describing an early (1987) adaptation of the
         DAOPHOT FORTRAN photometry package into IDL and available in /daophot

database.tex -- A LaTeX file describing how to use the IDL database software
         available in the /database directory.

ft.tex  - A LaTeX file describing how to use the ft* and tb* IDL procedures
         in the /fits_table directory along with READFITS/WRITEFITS to 
         read and write FITS ASCII tables and read FITS binary tables.

fits_bintable.tex  - A LaTeX file written by Bill Thompson (ARC/Goddard) 
         describing how to use the FITS binary table package in /fits_bintable.

mrdfits.txt - A text file describing the use of the large program MRDFITS.PRO
          in the /fits directory.   This program will directly map a FITS table
          into an IDL structure.     This information is also available at 
	  http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/mrdfits.html

idl_stsdas.tex --  a LaTeX file describing how to manipulate STSDAS
          images and tables using IDL procedures in the /sdas and /sdas_table
          directories.   The file is taken from Chapter 10 of the 
          Goddard High Resolution Spectrograph (GHRS) manual, written by 
          J. Blackwell, S.N. Shore, R.D. Robinson, K. Feggans, D. Lindler,
          E. Malamuth, J. Sandoval, and T.B. Ake.