With the arrival of a brand-new iMac with Lion (v10.7.4) in August 2012, the SIE is ready to give some basic support for the installation of astronomical software in Mac OS X.
As our experience with this OS is still limited, please bear with us if we are unable to help you with the installation of the package you need (other than the ones listed below).
As software installation in a Mac can be achieved thorugh different means (downloading the .dmg file, using Fink, MacPorts, Homebrew, compiling from source, etc.), it helps if you try to keep the configuration of your Mac as aligned as possible with that of our iMac, which we consider as the reference platform:
The AstroBetter site, among interesting posts and discussions on science and technology in general, provides a lot of info and tips about Mac OS X for astronomy.
Mac FAQ contains a list of Frequently Asked Questions about Mac OS X for astronomy. Note however that some of the FAQs are specific to the Berkeley Astronomy Department.
OS X for Astronomers helps you set up your Apple computer for professional astronomy, while OS X Astro Tricks contain "tips and bug fixes for running astronomy-related software on OS X".
A lot of astronomical packages are included in "Scisoft for Mac OSX". In this site you can find download and installation instructions. As the IAC has a site-wide licence for Supermongo, you can also request the Supermongo package, which is not included in the Export version.
If you prefer to install yourself individual packages instead of an "all-in-one" distribution such as Scisoft, here go some pointers.
| C and Fortran compilers | We installed the v4.8 (experimental) release (both gfortran and gcc)
from HPC. Alternatively, the
gfortran maintainers offer nice Apple-style installers for a variety of
Mac OS X releases, see http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/GFortranBinaries#MacOS. In general you will find multiple gcc versions in your Mac (the Mac OS X's one, the one installed with MacPorts, the other you got from HPC), and this will be bound to cause some confusion (for instance compilation of some particular package succeeds with one and fails with another). In general, to specify which gcc compiler you wish to use, just define the variable: export CC="/usr/local/bin/gcc" (this selects the HPC version). |
|---|---|
| DAOPHOT | I managed to compile (with gfortran) and install DAOPHOT in 64bit linking against IRAF v2.16. Some changes were required in the Makefile, and one of the source files had to be edited to correct a statement that produced an error upon compilation. If you have a legitimate copy of DAOPHOT's source code and wish to install it in a Mac, get in touch with us. |
| Dfits | This is a tool to display FITS header information on stdout. You'll have to download it from http://archive.eso.org/saft/dfits/ and compile it yourself. |
| DS9 | Download and install the appropriate DS9 binary from http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9/site/Download.html |
| Gipsy | The instalation procedure was a little convoluted, and required a slight modification of the setup file, but at the end it worked out (not the Python wrapper though). If you need help to install Gipsy in your Mac, get in touch with us. |
| HEASoft | Compilation is straightforward, you only need to be careful about what
specific compilers you use. See the HEASoft
Supported platforms page for details. The combination of compilers/flags
that worked for me was: export CC=/usr/bin/gcc export CXX=/usr/bin/g++ export FC=/usr/local/bin/gfortran export PERL=/usr/bin/perl |
| IRAF | We chose to download and install IRAF for MacIntel from the IRAF website: step-by-step instructions can be found in the SIEpedia article How to install IRAF 2.16 in Mac OS X. |
| IDL | Ask us for the .pkg file to install IDL v8.2. To use the IAC floating
licenses, define the following environment variable: export LM_LICENSE_FILE="1700@zuko" (bash) setenv LM_LICENSE_FILE "1700@zuko" (csh/tcsh) Also, ask us about how to install and set up the IDL astro lib (and other libraries such as Coyote, Markwardt, etc.) if you do not manage to do it yourself. |
| LaTeX | MacTeX seems to be the most popular LaTeX distribution for Mac. We installed it from http://www.tug.org/mactex/. You may also wish to install TeXShop. |
| Mathematica | Ask as for the .dmg file to install Mathematica version 9.0.1. When launching Mathematica for the first time, click on "Other ways to activate", select "Connect to a network license server" and type "zuko" (without quotation marks) in the Server name box. Then click Activate. That's it. |
| MIDAS | You will have to compile the source code yourself. Visit: http://www.eso.org/sci/software/esomidas/ for further details about MIDAS and for download/installation instructions. When we compiled MIDAS, we got the message "WARNING: Motif library release not found". The solution was simply to type /opt/local/lib when prompted for the directory containing the Motif library. |
| Python | Python (and several Python Astronomy Packages as well) were installed using MacPorts, following the instructions in MacPorts Python installation on Mac - 10 easy steps. |
| STSCI_Python | It can be easily installed from the tarfile. The only caveats are that
I had to use the HPC's gcc compiler, and set the --user flag (as explained
in the link above). Basically, what I did was: cd /path/to/stsci_python-2.13/ export CC="/usr/local/bin/gcc" /opt/local/bin/python setup.py install --user The PyRAF command will be in ~/Library/Python/2.7/bin/pyraf (you can create an alias, or make a symlink in /usr/local/bin/) |
| Starlink | We download and installed the Kaulia release http://starlink.jach.hawaii.edu/starlink/KauliaDownload for 64-bit Intel OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). |
| SuperMongo | Supermongo works fine, however you need to compile and install the version patched for Lion (it fixes a conflict with the getline library). For installation in Mountain Lion, I had to work around a problem with bison. Ask us for the tar file with the source code and for help installing SM. To fix the problem with line editing and command recalling, from the SM prompt type termtype xterm. |