2007 September 11
Today 120 was bitten in the ass by IDL. Hah. It was segfaulting when trying to run certain graphical routines, apparently because of an abused XLib call that was recently fixed in X.org. Things worked for some people though, and after some clever detective work by Dan Logan a “fix” was devised that allowed everyone to work, after losing only say an hour of time. Just saying, this kind of thing wouldn’t have happened with Python. (Though the problem here is more that IDL has an ancient and awful rendering model, not that it’s proprietary.) Students seemed to be having fun making histograms of bias pixel values; no one seemed to get to the point of plotting counts versus exposure time for the flats.
Besides that, finally had time to extract antenna gains from the second multi-FX8 dataset. The only real thing that took time was double-checking that the data looked OK and that I could apply the routines I wrote previously. Both of those seemed to be the case. Spent a little while trying to think if there was any especially clever way to compare the old and new gains, but didn’t come up with anything. Just looking at plots of the gains over time, it looks like things mostly agree within the significant jitter, and there probably isn’t much more to be said, quantitatively or qualitatively, than that. I’ll poke at this a little bit more with Geoff, send something to ata-user, and then hopefully get cracking on my broadband spectra proposal.
Also, overview of clusters and associations in Star Formation today. Fun class.