As diagnosed by Warren from a help call
The 'metric' task under 'hst_calib$wfpc' can be used to process lists of x,y positions from a table. It does so by looping over the list and calling a function to perform the computation for each x,y position in the list. The last lines in that function are:
call printf ("%11.7f %11.7f")
call pargd (ra)
call pargd (dec)
call printf ("\n")
# write to output CL parameters
call clpstr ("ra", rastr)
call clpstr ("dec", decstr)
As you can see, this will repeatedly update the task parameters with the computed ra,dec values.
Under IRAF, this works fine for lists of positions, however, under PyRAF it does crash after about 43 positions. I am actually going to modify the task to pull the output values out and only update the task parameters once as desired. This will solve the immediate problem, but still does not resolve the fundamental problem with PyRAF.
Cheers,
Warren
This likely is related to other reported problems with parameter gets of strings longer than 1024. But just in case, this is registered as a separate ticket
