WINGSPAN is a general purpose program for displaying and analysing BATSE trigger data, such as Gamma-Ray Bursts and Solar Flares. It can act upon any x-ray or gamma-ray data stored in suitable FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files. The program has several capabilities:
The data are displayed in multiple windows on an X-windows terminal and much of the data manipulation is done with a mouse. WINGSPAN is written in IDL and FORTRAN and the source code is provided for users to examine. After quitting WINGSPAN, the user is left in IDL with many of the variables defined and available for additional use.
The general flow of data into WINGSPAN starts with archived BATSE data in the Individual Burst DataBase (IBDB) format. The user selects the appropriate data type for their research and uses the program BFITS to create a FITS file from the data in the IBDB directory. BFITS, which runs in Tutor mode under TAE, selects and combines one or more data types, typically a BATSE background datatype and a burst datatype. In some cases, BFITS-produced FITS files are provided by the GROSSC. The resulting FITS file is then used as the input to one of the detector response matrix (DRM) generators (DRM_LAD_GEN or DRM_SPEC_GEN), which creates the DRM file in FITS format. Usually, this program is run in a batch process rather than interactively, since the calculation of the Earth atmospheric scattering matrices is CPU-intensive. WINGSPAN requires both types of FITS files for spectral fitting; you may skip making the DRM file if you are only interested in WINGSPAN's data display functions.
NOTE: Your version of WINGSPAN may have the spectral model fitting program MFIT disabled. Your machine must support FORTRAN 77 and IDL's CALL_EXTERNAL in order to be able to implement the MFIT option. References to MFIT in this document should be ignored if your version of WINGSPAN does not include MFIT.
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