Astronomy and Coffee

After almost getting crazy with my mac formating disks with ext2 and cursing a lot on that, I managed to understand how to make it do what I want! Good! Anyway, the ext2 support of Mac OS sux. Apple ignores it, so no official support and the only option is an old package that needs some improvements ...

Disks got ready, physically assembled and mounted. Now they're gonna stay on for a while to physically test them.

The problem of the 2GB files seems to be caused by GCC 3.3 (according to SDSS support), so I'll try to get 3.4 installed. And the files don't have to be in a raid like structure where the whole pack is in the same "disk".

IDL x spawned GALFIT is still going on. GALFIT works on our 64 machines, but not when they are spawned in IDL. actually, it works with X11 lib error messages in some of the machines and don't work at all in other machines ... the ball is back at the sysadm field. All that shows up because GALFIT opens an XTERM while running (which in my opinion is not really necessary, it could have a "non XTERM opening mode" - eventually it has and I don't know). BTW there are small differences on the results for the exact same setup using GALFIT for 32 bits (2.0.3) and for 64 bits (2.0.3c), they are small, but they are there!

GALAPAGOS is still running in one of the clusters in the first stage, the one that models the brightest 5% objects. Then I can split it in 4 processors/machines.

I also compared the objects detection in SExtractor 2.5 using the linux version and the Mac OSX version (that comes in SciSoft OSX). There are differences at the faint regime. Some object are detected by one and not by the other and vice-versa.

Mac version gives a different sky subtraction, no idea why, while 2.5 and 2.3.2 for linux give the same sky and the same number of objects ... still to find out why! Already asked Nor Pirzkal but got no reply up to now. Didn't have time to try to compile it myself ... 

Not to say it was a 100% technical day, I started the cross-identification of the objects to be observed, their catalogue number and their slit number (not that this is a GREAT task, but it takes a little time, and it has to be done, and it has to be done in linux, since FIMS doesn't work in Mac OS).