Extra functionality

CURSA can inter-operate with a number of other packages. These packages provide additional functionality which is not available in CURSA. Perhaps the most extensive and useful is FTOOLS, which is briefly described in Section , below. Another useful external package is Starbase, which is briefly described in Section , below.

The image display and analysis tool GAIA[12] reads and writes catalogues in the TST format. Thus, catalogues in this format can be exchanged between CURSA and GAIA. Some limited inter-operability is possible between CURSA and the image processing package KAPPA[5] (see Appendix ) and the image analysis package PISA[13] (see Appendix ).

Finally, CURSA is augmented by the CAT Fortran 77 subroutine library for manipulating catalogues and tables. Using CAT it is straightforward to write your own programs to perform specialised tasks not covered by the more general CURSA applications. Programs written with CAT are fully inter-operable with the standard CURSA applications (in fact the CURSA applications themselves use CAT). CAT is comprehensively documented in SUN/181[10]. A set of simple example programs are included with the CAT library.