First post by me on my own BLDG! I should transition to this address eventually...
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
FITS manipuation with imagemagick, gimp, etc.
It is possible to convert .fits files to .png, .jpg, etc: `` convert -normalize a.fits a.png `` To get things to come out nicely, you have to do the scaling essentially by hand in python/idl/iraf. DS9 is only useful for finding out what scaling you want to use; past that it's pretty much not useable. To make colors look nice in the GIMP, use solid background layers with your image as the alpha mask. Then put your image in with itself as an alpha mask so you can easily control the whiteness (saturation) of the color you've selected. I'll be blogging about this more as I prep my next entry for the NRAO photo contest.
Galactic Formaldehyde Densitometry Project
The Galactic Formaldehyde Densitometry Project is finally official and on its way. I am PI of a joint Arecibo / Green Bank Telescope project to survey formaldehyde, H2CO, in a sample of ~400 "dust clumps" in the Galactic Plane. The clumps represent condensations within larger molecular clouds that are likely to be forming stars, particularly massive stars and star clusters. Formaldehyde is uniquely useful for measuring densities of these gas clumps. Because of a collisional selection effect, the low-lying K-doublet transitions of H2CO undergo "anti-inversion", which means their lower-energy states are overpopulated relative to the higher states, and it can therefore be seen in absorption against the cosmic microwave background. This unique property removes a key bias present in emission line studies in which variable excitation conditions can dominate the observability of a line. For the next few posts, I will include calibration and data reduction information from the observations in this survey. The Green Bank observations are well underway, with nearly half of the sources observed (though many at poor sensitivity) and the Arecibo observations have been approved.
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.
Ghostscript error?
I've been receiving the following error when attempting to compile (ps2pdf) my w5 outflows paper:
Error: /rangecheck in --get--Operand stack: pdfmark --dict:20/25(ro)(L)-- --nostringval-- 50Execution stack: %interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1878 1 3 %oparray_pop 1877 1 3 %oparray_pop 1861 1 3 %oparray_pop 1755 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- %finish_show --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 8 6 1 --nostringval-- (pdf_text_enum_t) %op_show_continue --nostringval--Dictionary stack: --dict:1153/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:71/200(L)-- --dict:125/300(L)-- --dict:44/200(L)-- --dict:138/224(L)--Current allocation mode is localLast OS error: 2Current file position is 267478928GPL Ghostscript 8.71: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
I get the same error with Ghostscript 8.64, but on my laptop, using the fink version, it works. Similarly, there are errors with the postscript, so I'm led to believe it's an error in latex:
$ latex --versionpdfTeX 3.1415926-1.40.10-2.2 (TeX Live 2009)kpathsea version 5.0.0Copyright 2009 Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).There is NO warranty. Redistribution of this software iscovered by the terms of both the pdfTeX copyright andthe Lesser GNU General Public License.For more information about these matters, see the filenamed COPYING and the pdfTeX source.Primary author of pdfTeX: Peter Breitenlohner (eTeX)/Han The Thanh (pdfTeX).Compiled with libpng 1.2.39; using libpng 1.2.39Compiled with zlib 1.2.3; using zlib 1.2.3Compiled with xpdf version 3.02pl3
No idea what the cause is but it's time to start documenting steps and looking for a workaround. Compiling on the lappy isn't a good option.
Gildas CLASS
It's absurdly difficult to find help on GILDAS Class, probably because you can't google "class" and most people probably don't label every piece of code with "GILDAS class". Anyway, here are some scripts that I refer back to often: file in August2009BGPS.datfile out August2009fits.dat multipleon error "file out August2009fits.dat"say "READ IN FILES"define character sourcelist*10[300]accept sourcelist /column observed_sources.txton error "continue"get 1001set window -100 160set mask -400 -100 160 400set mode x -400 400set align velocityfor i 1 to 161 say "Working on SOURCE "'i' find /source 'sourcelist[i]' /telescope "CSO 4GHZ IF1" /offset 0 0 /quality 5 average on error "@avplot2 'sourcelist[i]' 'i'; next" base 3 line 0 min plot vis write i! on error "continue"next and file in araya-2004.clsfinddefine character filename*20for i 1 to 20 say "Working on source "'i' get next let filename "araya-2004_"'i'".fits" say "fits write "'filename'" /mode spectrum" fits write 'filename' /mode spectrumnext!file in araya-2002.cls!find!define character filename*20!for i 1 to 42 ! say "Working on source "'i'! get i! let filename "araya-2002_"'i'".fits" ! say "fits write "'filename'" /mode spectrum"! fits write 'filename' /mode spectrum!next
Histogram in Google Spreadsheet
It's not easy to make a histogram in google spreadsheets without replicating data. The "countif" function would be great, except it only allows very simple criteria. However, there's a workaround: =count(Filter('Grades'!V2:V30,'Grades'!V2:V30>0.9)) =count(Filter('Grades'!V2:V30,'Grades'!V2:V30<0.9,'Grades'!V2:V30>0.8)) The Filter() function returns an array, which can be operated on like any other set of cells. It's still not easy to make a nice-looking histogram, but the output of this process is at least usable.
Hosting on my mac
I'm hosting my website off my mac; it should be accessible to the outside world now: eta.colorado.edu. A few things went into this....
- Don't install the fink version. The two versions clash and depending on how you access your computer you could end up looking at entirely different directories (e.g. localhost and eta.colorado.edu referred to different sites for a while)
- The configuration file is /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
- I needed to change DirectoryIndex to index.htm (from index.html)
- uncommmented "LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so"
- had to allow override so that .htaccess files would work.
How do I print a multi-page postscript?
I want to print a multi-page postscript duplexed and, if possible, two per page. pstopng, pstopdf, and the variants failed me horribly by making postscripts that don't fit the bounding box at all. Any ideas? So far the best I've come up with is switching gnuplot's output to pdf, which is a workaround rather than a solution, but is useful nonetheless: set terminal pdf enhanced dashed