This is neat: Line Ratio as a function of density, incident flux from Marc Pound. Sadly, straight CO 3-2 intensity isn't included, but perhaps I can create that myself.
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
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.
New python software
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.
Outreach Observing
Some notes for this Friday... the ISS will rise at about 10:55 on Friday, July 18th, and 9:43 on Saturday, July 19th. Jupiter will be in the sky, but Venus and Mercury will not. Jupiter will rise in the Southeast
Denver, CO 2008/07/16 10:15 pm Sunrise/set: 05:46 am / 08:26 pmPredicted passes for: ISS daylight-saving time enabled Local Duration Date Time (min) Approach Max. elevation Departure------------------------------------------------------------------------2008/07/17 02:57 am <1 10° above N 10° above N 10° above NNE2008/07/17 04:30 am 5 12° above NNW 31° above NE 10° above E 2008/07/17 10:30 pm <1 13° above WSW 15° above WSW 15° above WSW2008/07/18 03:19 am 4 10° above NNW 16° above NNE 10° above ENE2008/07/18 04:54 am 5 15° above NW 78° above W 10° above SE 2008/07/18 09:19 pm 5 13° above SSW 29° above SE 11° above ENE2008/07/18 10:55 pm 4 17° above WNW 25° above NNW 10° above NNE2008/07/19 03:42 am 5 13° above NNW 32° above NNE 12° above E 2008/07/19 05:18 am 4 16° above W 22° above SW 11° above S 2008/07/19 09:43 pm 5 19° above WSW 71° above N 10° above NE
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!
pyspeckit: an astronomical spectroscopic toolkit
Jordan and I have been working on our python-based spectroscopic analysis tool for a while now: pyspeckit is a pretty awesome, now functional but incomplete (and incompletely documented) tool.
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:
- Install CFITSIO with CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -g -O2" to /usr/local/lib
- 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
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.