June 20, 1997 Dear Colleague, Version 3.2 of the COBE Guest Investigator Software (CGIS) is now available. Three improvements have been made. First and foremost is a change applicable to the ingest of the DIRBE data sets. A C program library designed to speed the ingest was included in a previous release. However, we have significantly improved the efficiency of the IDL code and recommend that the main IDL package be used for all data ingest. (The C package will only be needed by those whose workstations are slow or have little memory.) Second, instead of incorporating now-obsolete versions of several IDL Astronomy User's Library routines in the CGIS package, these routines have been omitted and calls are made to the standard "IDLASTRO" package. Thus, CGIS users must have the Astronomy User's Library installed on their machines. These widely-used routines are available from http://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/homepage.html Third, we created a new PKZIP file. Several users reported that the previous version was unusable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. You may obtain the new software and documentation by anonymous ftp from rosette.gsfc.nasa.gov in the pub/cobe-gi directory or via your Web browser at http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/astro/cobe/cgis.html). Please acknowledge your usage of COBE data in publications with the following statement: "The COBE datasets were developed by the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center under the guidance of the COBE Science Working Group and were provided by the NSSDC." Your comments and suggestions are welcome. If you report installation difficulties or software bugs, other users will benefit from your experience. For assistance, please contact me. Sincerely, David Leisawitz, COBE Deputy Project Scientist Code 631 NASA/GSFC Greenbelt, MD 20771 voice: 301-286-0807 Internet: leisawitz@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov