2007 August 30
Another day in which I just wasn’t able to put in that many hours, since I had two separate friends who happened to be in town that I spent time with. The time that I did spent was towards the data analysis for the 120 photometry lab. I wrote a quick, 80%-useful module to display an ndarray, and used it to check that my flatfielding code was working more or less correctly. After some consultations with the redoubtable JohnJohn, I think that I can generate trustworthy flat frames.
My next step is to locate stars in the science frames. I think that I can do this relatively well (via point-and-click user interaction) without too much effort, but given that the stars don’t move around too much, I could probably do it a lot more quickly manually. A simple cursor-location feedback system would be enough for a first cut. Then, I need 2D Gaussian fitting to get the star locations more precisely. Hopefully numpy or scipy has something to do this; I don’t want to translate gaufit2d.pro from IDL into Python.
Once that’s all done, I think I can bang out the aperture photometry in a day, if it’s as simple as I think it ought to be.
Maybe I should switch over from this work back to ATA stuff, though. I don’t have the clearest idea of what my next step with that data should be, though. I should consult with Geoff (Bower) about that.
Third consecutive night at which I’m in Campbell past midnight. But, in my defense, in all three cases it’s been because I’ve been out with people late and have just needed to pick up my bike before going home. Once all my stupid friends stop being in the stupid Bay Area, this kind of thing will come to a stop. I hope.