Subject: new SMART release

The Cornell IRS Instrument Team is pleased to provide the latest
release of SMART and its accompanying calibration files to the
astronomical community.

SMART release version number 6.2.6.

Calibration file release number 1.4.9.

These replace all previous versions.
Both tarballs can be downloaded from Cornell at :

http://isc.astro.cornell.edu/Main/SmartRelease

Users are strongly advised to download and install both tarballs.
This will ensure that you have the most up to date versions
of both the software and Calibration files.

Full installation instructions are available at :

http://isc.astro.cornell.edu/smart/release-docs/sug/install.html

A list of changes to the software in this release can be seen at :

http://isc.astro.cornell.edu/smart/current_release_notes.html

The most recent release of Calibration files provided to the SMART
developers by the SSC is V15.3. These are included in this release.
SMART is set to use these as its default Calibration files.

The main change to the Calibration files tarball is that time dependent
(campaign dependent) variations in which Long High Calibration files
to use are now set automatically. Previously SMART was defaulting to using
a generic Long High "all campaigns" file. This improves accuracy in the
extraction of Long High data.

A number of changes have been made to the SMART software.
The start up script is now "bash" rather than "cshrc",
though the path names that need to be set are the same.
Most visible are the addition of extra FITS keywords to
track the settings of Calibration files and user parameters
used during extraction. Non-default changes of Calibration files
and user parameters are now made on completely seperate windows.
The handling of "!sm_fwhmfactor" has changed significantly.
A range limit has been enforced. It automatically defaults
to +1.0 for all high resolution data and a bug has been fixed that
previously resulted in it switching from -1.0 to +1.0
in certain circumstances. The accompanying documentation has been
re-written and expanded to fully explain its function in greater detail.