Repositories for observers

I should have posted these a while ago....
casaradio is a subversion repository for folks at The Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy at CU Boulder to post radio astronomy related codes. So far, emphasizes single dish (GBT, Arecibo), but will include EVLA, CARMA, and ALMA eventually.
aposoftware is a similar page, but is a mercurial repository and is meant to include instrument-specific software for the Apache Point Observatory 3.5m telescope. Right now includes a TUI script or two and the TSPEC and DIS IRAF-twodspec pipelines.

I'd be remiss to leave out the BGPS pipeline even though it's mentioned on the previous post.

Also, agpy is my personal code repository.

BGPS data paper published

Metalinking! The BGPS paper finally made it onto astro-ph today. It will be published in ApJS before the year's end.

Links to all of the published BGPS papers at the Bolocam Data Team website

And just because I want more linking, here they all are again:
The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey I. Survey Description and Data Reduction arXiv
The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey II. Catalog of the Image Data arXiv
The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey III. Characterizing Physical Properties of Massive Star-Forming Regions in the Gemini OB1 Molecular Cloud arXiv
The Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey IV: λ = 1.1 and 0.35 mm Dust Continuum Emission in the Galactic Center Region

The same set of links is reproduced at the pipeline googlecode page.

Neat new things....

1. sptool is a quick way to compare standards to stellar spectra. Nice, I'd been looking for a tool like that.
2. GNU screen captions are useful especially when working in a screen-within-a-screen environment (who does that, really?)
3. finally got SPLAT to work... turns out I just hadn't reduced my damned data
4. kill -STOP and kill -CONT are really useful ways to pause programs that are sucking up resources if you want to resume them later. Haven't tried this on "real" code yet.

IDL-to-Python

astrobetter started up an idl-to-python guide on their wiki.

EVLA information

It has been really hard to find EVLA information like beam size, largest angular scale, sensitivity, etc. on the VLA pages because all of the google searches point to old VLA information. The most useful and recent EVLA information on beam size and largest angular scale is here

RATRAN on Mac OS X

Mac OS X doesn't like the defaults built in to RATRAN. It died unhappily with errors like:

ld_classic: can't locate file for: -lcrt0.o
and
ld: warning: in /usr/local/lib//libcfitsio.a, file is not of required architecture


In order to get it to run, I had to do the following:

1. Install CFITSIO with CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -g -O2" to /usr/local/lib
   
2. Edit the sky/Makefile OPT variable (line 23) to read:
   OPT = -I. -O2 -fno-automatic -arch x86_64
   

Also, you need to set up system variables:

export RATRAN=/path/to/Ratran 
export RATRANRUN=/path/to/Ratran/run 

New python software

IDLsave was released on my birthday. It does what you'd expect - read IDL save files into Python.
APLpy has a make_RGB_cube function now that takes care of all the internals of making an RGB image.... haven't tried it yet but I need to because it is awesome.

astro-better post

I contributed to a post on Astro Better asking about mosaicing software.

#6 on Astro-ph today

IRAS 05358 on astro-ph. Check out my page on the region too.

First paper accepted

My Comps II paper on IRAS 05358+3543 was accepted by ApJ on Wednesday. It will show up on arxiv in a few days and I'll post the link then. Unfortunately, there were significant problems rendering the paper, so I recommend downloading my version.

Also, working on the HISA KDA... I have a nice section of cutouts

Galaxy Map

If you're ever interested in seeing a face-on view of the Milky Way, check out the Spitzer press release. This link is very surprisingly hard to find on google.

Acquiring DSS images

This is the way to get DSS images:
ESO's batch downloader

Most important astronomical publications

I'm interested to hear input on this. Some I know of:
Cardelli, Clayton, Mathis 1989 - determined interstellar extinction law
Kurucz 1993 - possibly a book? Stellar atmosphere calculations

sage casjobs

annoying feature of sage casjobs: no spaces are allowed, no matter what, even if quoted. so when importing must remove all spaces. gurrh.

Marc Pound's toolbox

This is neat:

Line Ratio as a function of density, incident flux from Marc Pound. Sadly, straight CO 3-2 intensity isn't included.

SETI

I read a paper on ArXiv today about SETI, and talked to Jeremy Darling about water masers. This got me thinking: the best way to signal your presence to the universe as an intelligent civilization is to take advantage of natural amplification. So, say, you go find a big cloud of water molecules in the right state to start masing, and blast them with some of the right frequency radio emission: you get a strongly enhanced isotropic emitter. Maybe SETI should look for those, then search for nearby coherent sources....


EDIT: Isotropic? No.

Parallactic Angle

So it turns out parallactic angle and field rotation are essentially the same thing. While working on the data pipeline for the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey, I've needed to deal with this. The parallactic angle is dependent on the alt/az, and therefore the time, of the observation. So using an RA/Dec in J2000 coordinates to get alt/az isn't going to work, because my observations weren't in 2000.0.... my best hope is that the PA in the NCDF files is actually the correct parallactic angle.

YARGH!

Observing this weekend

whoops, never made this post. Turns out I got rained out - 3 inches of rain on my night. Sad, no DIS time for P Cyg.

Lunar Occultation Hi-Res measurements

The folks at the VLT have come up with a means of achieving extremely high resolution from the ground: Observe when the moon occults a source and how long the occultation takes. Sweet.

This was applied in the galactic center first, of course:
Observations of binaries in GC
Additional observations in GC

Awk sexagesimal to decimal conversion

In VIM I often need to convert columns of RA/Dec from Sexagesimal into Decimal format.

%!awk '{ra = ($2+$3/60+$4/3600)*15; dec = $6+$7/60+$8/3600; print $1,"ra=",ra,", dec= ",$5,dec}'


The far more irritating inverse operation:

%!awk '{h=($2/15); h=h-(h\%1); m=($2-h*15)/15*60; m=m-(m\%1); s=($2-h*15-m*15/60)/15*3600; d=-($3-$3\%1); am=(-$3-d)*60; am=am-(am\%1); as=(-$3-d-am/60)*3600; printf "\%s \%02i:\%02i:\%02.2f
, -\%02i:\%02i:\%02.2f \%s \%s \%s\n" , $1,h,m,s,d,am,as,$4,$5,$6}'