Over!
Finally! WCS problems "solved" and GALAPAGOS running.
The first steps were perfect in the laptop, but presented some small library problems on the heavy machines back in the institute ... bad! It's running anyway! Now doing the GALFIT fitting on each single object. Actually doing the fitting of the brighter 5% and then I'll distribute into four processors (I have four tiles) to have the rest of the fits faster.
Some talking with Wolfgang Kapferer and Thomas Kronberger about simulations of groups and with Daniel Clarke about finding overdensities in the galaxy catalogues.
A great week here in Goettingen. Tomorrow lunch in Munich with my friend Dimitri Gadotti and then go back home!!!
Innsbruck rox!!
Late from yesterday, still in Innsbruck
Not much today. We stayed the whole day struggling with WCS in ACS. Galapagos requires that the WCS is correct at the borders to deal with multiple matches of objects in different tiles of the mosaic. My projects (and everyone's, requires that WCS is right in a absolute sense. I think we got it, gotta check that now. Astrometry.net would do that quite easily!
Also it was a sort of short day since we left early for Christmas Market and dinner with Sabine Schindler and her group. Very pleasant evening.
Wavelets and Galapagos
Today the morning was a small walk in the town, very nice sunny (but very cold) day and a discussion about application of wavelets to the detection of overdensities in images generated from galaxy position catalogues. Still needs some "tuning" but it can be done. Eventually the a trous is not the best function, but the idea remains :-) In the afternoon application of GALAPAGOS from scratch (still happening due to WCS problems) so that I can check every step with Marco Barden before coming back to Germany.
About yesterday, couldn't give much detail, because we were leaving to have some Gluehwein in the Christimas market and dinner.
Marco's talk about morphological classification on STAGES. 3 main approaches. 1 Eye classification, 2 non-parametric and 3 parametric methods.
1- Eye inspection, 5000 galaxies were classified by 7 classifiers (not all of them received the 5000 galaxies, they were randomly distributed, but each was inspected my 3 of the 7 members). Many classes, many flags and a big dispersion, as expected.
2- As non-parametric they as using CAS (concentration, asymmetry and "clumpyness"). Another option would be the GINI coefficient. I have to search more about it, because we're getting right in this point about now!
3- Parametric, they used GALFIT to get the parameters of the galaxies (that's exactly the part of Marco, the GALAPAGOS). GALFIT already have version 3.0 (still "under request" basis) and it can do Fourier fitting. So using higher order terms, non-symmetric structures, such as lobes, can be modeled. The physical interpretation of that is a whole other story!
In the afternoon I had the introduction to GALAPAGOS. That's the name of the code that gets the 80 ACS pointings of STAGES, detect and do single-sersic fit in all the objects present there. It's an impressive code. Almost fully automatic, really minimum interaction is required, basically selection of the not many spurious objects that can appear in the catalogue (a couple of weeks in the case of STAGES, a couple of ours per cluster in our case - 4 pointings per cluster). The amount of details to be taken in consideration in an analysis like this is big. Things like GALFIT requires a mask in the regions that should not be used in the fitting, or the objects that should be simultaneously fitted and for some thousands of objects those things can't be done "one by one". GALAPAGOS manage to do this ... very cool! At the end it prepares the "post stamps" (or thumbnails, as other people like to call), the masks and the input files. The other main issue they took in consideration was how to optimize and to parallelize all that procedure. His paper with the description is in preparation, almost ready!
Galapagos!
In the morning Marco Barden gave a talk about the morphological classification in STAGES. A lot of work
And in the afternoon I had my GALAPAGOS introduction, very nice work, very handy. I'll start trying it tomorrow to have doubts and solve them :-)))))
In Innsbruck
So! Trip to Innsbruck was good and calm, no problems with the trains.
Took my time in the trip to prepare the ACS images (bringing them back to counts, instead of counts/sec and putting the original sky back) and to get more information about weak lensing.
Gave my talk today and people seemed to have liked it. There was some nice questions, for example about how much of the galaxy light is absorbed by dust and how this would influence the IGL fractions. Infrared data could tell us that.
Got a nice reply from John Krist, one of the authors of Tiny Tim, telling me that TT doesn't take the transformations from MultiDrizzle in consideration for ACS PSFs. So that the option in the case would be generating the models for the "wished" positions, put it on a raw image and drizzle it and get the drizzled model back. Talking to Marco Barden, he said that better than using TT PSF is to get a considerable number of stars from the images and generating a good, high-S/N PSF (as they have done for GEMS). So that will be my approach on this case.
Tomorrow we'll start with the GALAPAGOS and some discussions about simulations!!
Lots of small problems!
So! Yesterday and today! :-)
Yesterday two doctor appointments for the exams on Matheus health one in the morning (whole morning btw) and one in the evening.
In the mean while trying to make a FORS2 image, suitable for FIMS but with image quality. Took a while and a dirty trick, but it has worked. A very bureaucratic tool ...
Today trying to figure out things about Tiny Tim. The task is quite simple to make it work and it already comes in SciSoft. Read the manual to make it work, had the assistance of Elif Kutdemir, Bodo's student, and it works ... but is it really doing what I need?? Good question!
The point is: I'm using ACS DRZ images. MultiDrizzle corrects the geometric (making a mosaic with the 2 CCDs that looks like a tilted square) and it affects the PSF (HST/ACS Handbook). Is Tiny Tim taking that in consideration?? How to deal with the pix position with 2 CCDs in a single frame?? Couldn't find the answer. So I e-mailed John Krist at JPL (not in STSCI since 2004 - took me a e-mail bounce to figure that out). If anyone knows the answer PLEASE let me know!
Since the day was spent on that, I decided to try to get rid of problems.
SExtractor that comes with SCISOFT was not working well on my MacBook. Installed the same version on the linux machine to compare results. Well, same version, same image, same configuration, same everything and the results are different (bkg, bkg rms, thres, # of objects) and it doesn't work with the option "-BACKGROUND" (no objects are detected), but the different linux machines have the same result. So e-mail to Nor Pirzkal asking about it also ... again, if anyone has a clue about it, let me know.
Also yesterday working on the introduction of the new IGL paper.
Next week in Insbruck to give a talk and to work with Marco Barden on the GALAPAGOS code in the group of Sabine Schindler.
Serveral small things!
Yesterday (no post) big part of the day was used doing things downtown, to be ready for the trip next sunday. Next week I'll be in Insbruck with Sabine Schindler's group.
Back here, retriving, producing and including some information on the tables to the mask preparation for our VLT run next month. Today also a lot of crosschecking on it.
Got the information, after some trials, that FIMS (ESO tool for masks in FORS) don't work in MacOS, even though is a plugin for skycat and skycat runs in MacOS (thanks to SciSoft). Even the FIMS code would need modifications for MacOS, so we have to wait ... bad! With the MacOS users increasing a lot (even I became one) ESO and other astronomical institutions should pay attention to that (we're not talking about windows!).
Today some AWK learning to get tables done the way I want!
And some reading on the IGL material to be able to close this ASAP.
Tomorrow I'll start preparing also the GALFIT/BUDDA data to be analyzed, but only after the morning doctor appointment for Matheus'/Fernanda's check-up!!!
No data today!
Day solving small problems and reading! Not a rushy day, but not "relaxing" hehehehe
Finally!
For yesterday and today!
Finally a selected sample in color, 1-component sersic index and magnitude limited!!
There are some weird objects there, but we'll be able to observe good things. Now prepare the masks (not my task).
On the street
Most of the day solving problems in town or by phone or by fax/e-mail.
The red sequence is almost there, all matched, now marking and preparing the plot ...
Converging
So! Converging! Yesterday night a lot of work, today some more and some more at night will happen. Lets see how all those preparations converge in a plot :-)
New input
So, weekend, a lot of work, inside and outside science! :-)
Carrying furniture on the street (some stuff that we needed for the new flat), assembling it and putting things into places! Now there're no boxes anymore!! Only minor things in the living room, in the office and big things in the basement (where I'm making my bike workshop).
Science, searched for missed objects now matching the whole thing so that I can do a "pixel match" with the GALAPAGOS analyzed catalogue that Marco Barden sent us. That took time on the weekend and today the whole day and will take sometime at home again!
That was the day! A lot of catalogue searching and eye inspection on ACS images.
Home work
What I wanted to do today, will be my tonight's home work ... yesterday night I had the "bad" idea of finally upgrading to Leopard (Mac OS 10.5) and this morning I found out the "weird" behavior of X11, some stuff with IRAF and that IDL also had its issues with the new OS. Took me a while, it's still weird, but it's running ...
Today we had a very nice talk from Andreas Seifahrt about the pipeline for image reduction from the TERAPIX. Very good!! Gotta try some of those!!!
MHOD change of UID/GID
Mac hint of the day (MHOD):
I wanted to change my UID and GID on the MacBook to have the same as in the institute. I managed to find on the web (if it's not in GOOGLE, it doesn't exist). Don't mean to teach that to anyone, is just to remember later :-)
http://www.eecs.umich.edu/dco/help/NFSMac.htm
To change your UID/GID on your mac:
1. Go to the NetInfo Manager (Applications -> Utilities)
2. Authenticate as an administrator by clicking the lock in the lower left corner
3. Click on Users in the list, and find your username.
4. When you click on it, you should see info about it at the bottom of the screen… scroll down until you see UID and GID and change those appropriately. Make sure you keep track of your old UID so that you can change permissions on your files.
5. Use a command like the following to change file permissions over to you again.
find / -xdev -user
-print -exec chown {} \;
Getting better
Go the day for sure was better than yesterday!
Object selection was the focus. It will be tricky, but we can make it. This ends this week :-)
Day to stay home!
Yesterday (late from Wednesday) was a good day to sleep the whole day and just straight into Thursday!
Early Dr. appointment (that's the good part of the day) where we saw that everything is OK with Matheus and we could hear his heart beat!!!
After that, a lot of rain, broken glasses (had to stay the whole day wearing sun glasses - in a rainy dark weather - while the normal ones were repaired), lots problems that cannot be solved as a final word, and no way to work with sun glasses made the day pretty bad!
At the end of the day we went to the movies to see a very nice movie "Stardust".
Not there
Tried a correction for the "gain=2" and it didn't work ... gotta find out what else to do with it.
Light P4?
Testing and testing. Tomorrow we should close the "question". Let's see. There can be a calibration error. The point is where?? FORS and ACS have very well defined zero points. Unless the ACS image is not in "counts per second" as the header says but in "electrons per second" ... then there can come some extra light ... but should I trust the header??
Also checking computer issues! Some money to be spent on that.
Weekend checking things for Matheus and organizing the flat. Now we have a living room, we may have a shower wall and not a waterfall (to be checked on wednesday) and now I have to organize the office and the basement (where I'll have my bike workshop).
Light p3?
Comparing photometry is not a doable task, that's a fact!!
Got the MORPHS data for this cluster and the comparison of the photometry of course didn't give us any good thing, since part of the data is ground based, part is HST, different cameras, different filters ... a big mess.
We'll try more on Monday ...
Light p2!
Found some important info on the red sequence for this clusters. Also checking the backup cluster for possibilities ... work for tomorrow. Gotta leave to visit the second hospital possibility for Matheus birth.
