2008 May 27
Trying to keep the posting pace up. What did I do today?
-
Followed an email thread with some in-depth analysis of the performance of the SETI beamformer, which isn’t strongly connected to my ATA science work, but I’d like to get as global a view of the components of the ATA as possible.
-
Also joined in some discussion about how the ATA’s control software is managed. I wrote a quick monitor program that I’d like to integrate into the software package, and my question about how to add the program to the software suite got people talking about how things ought to be as opposed to how they currently are. I will probably look into this some more as I’m fond of this aspect of software design.
-
Continued some analysis that I started yesterday with my old broadband spectra dataset. It’s been a long time that I looked at this stuff. I added bandpass calibration to the analysis pipeline, since some tests I did made it look like it improves one’s results pretty significantly. I also made some other changes based on a few other things I’ve learned in the past few weeks. I realized that the particular data set that I’m working with presents some extra problems since my best reference source set early into the night. I was hoping to calibrate a second source based on the first one and use it for the rest of the night, but the results I get from that are too far from ideal to trust at all. I think this is the time-smearing rearing its head, since the residuals I get from a straight point-source fit are pretty severe.
That last item is most directly related to what I should be working on, but unfortunately I’m not sure what I should take a look at tomorrow. I guess, now that I think my better calibrations are settled, I can check out how well my fringe-rate compensator helps. Or I can spend some time on one of the many miscellaneous tasks I’d like to take care of.