Stellar Atmosphere and Spectral Synthesis Codes

As created by Dr. R. Kurucz

1997 October 27

During the past two years I have not once looked at the Kurucz codes nor corresponded with Dr. Kurucz. At the time I last attended to them, the code translation strategies were already in need of revision. There has been significant subsequent evolution of the operating systems and compilers under which this code would now be run, and Kurucz has continued to evolve some of the codes themselves.

At present there seems little chance that I will be able to return my attention to these codes. I cannot offer any kind of support of them. Under these conditions I do not feel that I can distribute what I have.

My principal regret is that I am not distributing the documentation of the codes and their operation that was assembled with the assistance of Dr. Peterson (see below). I do not know how valuable this documentation is. If it is of particular value I might be persuaded to offer the as-is code for that purpose alone.

My suggestion to those who wish to make use of these codes is to contact Dr. Kurucz directly and enter into a relationship with him. He can provide a current list of the CDROMs containing the code and data.

1995 Spring

During the interval that Dr. Ruth Peterson has been at UCO/Lick Observatory I have been working with the stellar atmosphere and spectrum synthesis codes written by Dr. R. Kurucz at Harvard/CfA. These codes are now ported to any generic Unix system and are producing results identical to those obtained by Kurucz on his VMS VAX and alpha systems. They also come with a great deal of documentation and several fully-worked example runs. These have been used successfully as a part of the homework for several graduate level courses in stellar atmospheres.

Others have also ported the Kurucz codes (e.g., see the CCP7 effort in England, and especially the work of Dr. M. Lemke. Also see John Lester). However, the manner in which I have ported these codes has been to create a set of programs and scripts which automatically run thru the Kurucz codes and rewrite sections of Fortran which do not conform to the ANSI standard. This means that I can trivially port any new releases of the code from Kurucz. This porting scheme is operating on Sun, SGI, and on my home Linux system. It should work with relatively little effort on anything else, too.

The main compressed tar file which includes 1991, 1993, and the CDROM 18 versions of the code along with the translators is 2.6Mbytes. (I carry it home on 2 floppies). Note that for full use, you will need to obtain the CDROMs with atmospheric and spectral line data from Dr. Kurucz.

With the approval of Dr. Kurucz I will provide these codes upon request (I need merely type 2 words). When they have been requested they appear on the UCO/Lick anonymous ftp server lick.ucsc.edu in the directory /pub/outgoing/sla as the files atlas.tar.Z and include.tar.Z. I do not provide them on a permanent automatic basis in order that I might inform Dr. Kurucz how widely they spread.

Of most importance to my thesis work has been the ability to generate synthetic spectra. Kurucz has recently been providing his code and data on CDROM. By keeping the bulk of the spectral line databases on CDROM, I can generate spectra on my home Linux box using only 10 Megabytes of hard disk.

Also see the WWW interface to the Kurucz line lists.

Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org>