A face-lift for RV

Pat Wallace's program RV (SUN/78), which is used to calculate radial velocity corrections, has just had a face lift. An X-windows interface is now available, and can be invoked as an alternative to the traditional version by using the command xrv instead of rv.

The new interface (shown in the picture above) features an observatory browser and entry boxes for all required parameters. However, despite the new look, the same old reliable RV is still used behind the scenes to calculate the corrections and hence you will get identical results, regardless of whether you use the new or the traditional interface.

This enhancement is intended mainly as a demonstration of how one can add a graphical user interface (GUI) to a terse, free-standing application without any modification to the source code. RV's companion applications COCO and ASTROM, which are similarly terse in style, could be provided with GUIs if there was any demand from users.