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.
Articles by Adam (keflavich@gmail.com)
Review: Fruition restaurant
I ate at Fruition restaurant last night with the family. They serve haute cuisine. I had the beef coulotte. It was pretty tasty, but overall a bit too creamy for my taste. The wine had a hint of cherry flavor to it. The dinner was pretty good, but overall a little disappointing for the price. The French press coffee was a bit much as I would have preferred a small cup of cappuccino. I wouldn't object to going back when they switch to a new seasonal menu, but I'm not going out of my way.
running at altitude
wow dude. I suck at that. I swear there were some other things I had to write down but I can't remember them now. precipitable water vapor precipitates and that can be good
Russell Owen, DS9
As I might have expected, Russell Owen from the University of Washington - the man responsible for the Telescope User Interface, TUI, on the Apache Point Observatory telescope - has written up a help page for XPA access points on ds9. He knows his stuff... I think I need to aspire to that.
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.
SAVE / RESTORE in Python
Save/Restore is probably the single best feature of IDL that, sadly, is very poorly replicated in Python. For 1 or 2 dimensional variables, you can use Pylab's save/load, but I never use such piddling tiny arrays. For higher dimensional objects, either using FITS files (a pain because of header definitions) or pickling ought to work. e.g.: import numpyimport picklex=ones([10,10,10,10],dtype='float64')pickle.dump(x,open('x.pysav','w'))X = pickle.load(open('x.pysav','r'))
scary
I think this is my worst nightmare: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap081203.html LA. Not the smiley.
Screen cont'd
Guide to screen Particularly useful features: Scrollback: ctrl-a [[scroll keys] Switch to a numbered screen (doesn't work for me so far): ctrl-a [number]
Screen, nohup, ssh, scp
I learned a lot about the above in the past day, but I didn't keep track of the links. First, screen is very useful: it allows you to run any task, detach the screen, and let it run in the background. You can resume it later. Example: screenipython run_fitter.py<ctrl-a> dscreen -r Second, it's a huge pain to type a password every time I use scp and ssh. The solution is to make a key on your computer and put it in the authorized_keys file. ssh-keygen -t rsascp ~/.ssh/id_rsa ginsbura@milkyway.colorado.edu:.ssh ginsbura@milkyway.colorado.educat id_rsa >> ~/.ssh/authorized_keysssh -v ginsbura@milkyway.colorado.edu Use ssh -v to figure out why it fails if it still asks you for a password. In one case, this happened because the computer I was using expected the id to be in ~/.ssh/identity instead of ~/.ssh/id_rsa. There may also be permissions issues (i.e. you want restrictive permissions on your ssh keys). With the latter, you can still use nohup, which is helpful if you want to pipe your output to a log file.
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.