Problem(s) Encountered:

Despite the fact that I had not even closed the window from which I had

successful run ''obsctrtask'' yesterday without any problems, said program

decided to not cooperate today.

Closing the current terminal, and restarting the program in various other

directories did not help, neither did the transfer of the .par as suggested the online manual.

In the end, I resorted to drive the objects onto the slit by  hand and applying some translational and rotational transformations. Not ideal, but at least do-able in a reasonable amount of time -- hence, at most I lost maybe 20min in total.

Below is the detailed error message when the program crashed :

Task osctrtask is running...

Acquisition image number (0:100000) (68):

Slit image number (0:100000) (65):

Exception in Tkinter callback

Traceback (most recent call last):

 File  /usr/custom/Anaconda-2.1.0/lib/python2.7/lib-tk/Tkinter.py , line 1486, in __call__

   return self.func(*args)

 File  /usr/custom/Anaconda-2.1.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/stsci/tools/editpar.py , line 1245, in execute

   self.runTask()

 File  /usr/custom/Anaconda-2.1.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/stsci/tools/editpar.py , line 1754, in runTask

   self._taskParsObj.run(mode=''h'', _save=1)

 File  /usr/custom/Anaconda-2.1.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyraf/iraftask.py , line 359, in run

   self._run(redirKW, specialKW)

 File  /usr/custom/Anaconda-2.1.0/lib/python2.7/site-packages/pyraf/iraftask.py , line 1202, in _run

   self._pyFunction(*pl)

TypeError: osctrtask() takes exactly 19 arguments (18 given)

Solutions:

The error message indicates that osctrtask is not getting all the header keywords it expects.  osctrtask is (of course) entirely free of bugs.

It would be possible, with a little effort, to rewrite that section so it''s less brittle, though. (Thorstensen)