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Topcat, Top Dog

September 22, 2010 by

Astrobetter has a guest post by Niall “in the gutter” Deacon of the University of Hawaii on one of my favourite pieces of astronomical software, Topcat. Developed as part of the UK’s Virtual Observatory program Astrogrid, Topcat gives astronomers Tools for Operations on Catalogues and Tables. That doesn’t sound very sexy, but for anyone who deals with data from large public surveys or needs to cross-match several large datasets, Topcat is the grease in the cogs of their productivity.

Niall recorded a cool screencast to show off some of Topcat’s functionality, which I’ve embedded above.  There’s also some useful discussion in the comments on Astrobetter, including one from Mark Taylor who actually wrote Topcat.

I use Topcat almost exclusively in conjunction with image viewer Aladin. Connecting the two via the SAMP protocol, which is done at the click of a button, allows you to send targets back and forth between the two, visualise catalog data or create tables from image data. Recent versions of DS9 are also VO-enabled, though I find the VO functionality of Aladin, i.e. searching catalogs, images and archives, more efficient and versatile.

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Making my software open

April 6, 2010 by

After thinking  about software development in astronomy and talking about it with friends at work and on this blog, I thought it was about time I put my money where my mouth is. I too write software – in fact, the bulk of my work here in Leiden has been based around code I’ve written over the past 2 years for the METIS project (in IDL). The code basically calculates the sensitivity of METIS on the E-ELT, or the minimum flux it will be able to detect at a particular signal to noise (S/N) in a given exposure time over its wavelength range,  in various modes of observation. You can find the full package with background info on my brand-new github page, and a paper is in preparation (to be presented at SPIE 2010) for your referencing pleasure.

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On Software in Astronomy

March 1, 2010 by

Importance of the Hubble archive. The number of archival papers has exceeded the number of PI-led papers since 2006 (from White et al., 2009)

ResearchBlogging.org
I’ve been giving some thought to software development in astronomy, which is a difficult topic. All astronomers agree that good data processing, and hence good software, is crucial to doing rigorous science. To interpret observational data, to translate electrons on a detector to scientific knowledge, requires a solid understanding of the instrument, the observing conditions, and of the exact process with which the data were treated. Many large ground- and space-based observatories, like those run by ESO, Gemini and NASA, strive to provide the community with “science-ready” data. This means that the data are processed to remove all instrumental signatures, allowing astronomers to dive straight into the analysis.

The rationale is that providing science-ready data essentially makes them usable by a much wider community than those involved in the observing campaign, or those used to working with a given instrument. Indeed, a big driver behind the global Virtual Observatory initiative is the “democratisation of astronomy” by providing anyone in the world with ready-to-use astronomical data, irrespective of their location or affiliation to large organisations.

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Bringing open source to astronomy

March 28, 2009 by

A very interesting paper was posted on astro-ph this week on software development in astronomy. Authored by Benjamin Weiner of Steward Observatory in Arizona and many colleagues, the paper is one of many on the State of the Profession submitted to the 2010 Decadal Survey for astronomy and astrophysics (lots of interesting papers in this category, check out the full list here). The position paper describes a problem that I think is well known in the astronomy community: that software development for instruments and large simulations is not adequately funded, and that the developers do not get the recognition they deserve for their extremely valuable work. They call for changes in the way that software development is tackled in research. I entirely agree.

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My favourite online tools

September 2, 2008 by

Over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with online tools with mainly two goals: (i) social networking, as I was fed up with the format of the traditional social networking platforms like Facebook and MySpace, and (ii) productivity, to help me manage and plan my workload. I have just one laptop and some disk space on our work servers and am constantly travelling, so back ups are *very* important. Working on several projects also makes good diary keeping, notes and to do lists are essential for keeping on top of things. I also recently got an iPhone so am still exploring the best ways of syncing between my phone and laptop. Oh yeah, and some things are just fun!

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