Studying, but now in Garching
Some redshift checking and a lot of studying ...
Just for the record, the new versions of linux SUX! My Fedora 10, was preventing me from entering from outside, some obscure configuration firewall that I can't find a way to change ... and now the window system decided not to login ... I'll try again on the weekend ... blah.
It's getting more and more difficult to do science.
Windows ... forget it, it's a joke.
MacOSX ... good, stable, but somethings don't work, and will never work because Apple don't care about us. The fact that we can work with Macs is just because in order to have a stable system they based it on BSD (a sort of PC Unix). They don't really care about science users. This is clear buy the X11 support they have ...
Linux, it's getting worse everyday! Every version is more unstable and full of obscure automatic things that crash or prevent you from doing what you want ...
Still, if you're thinking about buying a new computer buy a Mac ...
Labels: applications, linux
Week summary!
So! A week summary.
Red sequence fit ... there are some discrepancy with models in some cases, but that needs more attention than I can give now.
Applications.
Studying for my exam. That will have to go faster, otherwise I don't finish it on time.
Carolina Nunes, student at ESO, found here at this blog that I would be able to help here with GALFIT problems :-) This is not the first time that happens, some months ago, Mathias Zetzl, a colleague from Goettingen found information about KCORRECT here. Unfortunately that time it was out of my knowledge of the code. Also some IDL hints were asked here. I guess I could help Carolina.
Good to know that some information here is useful to the people!
With Carolina's problem, I decided to but basic hints here about GALFIT.
To run it properly, aside from the good initial guesses, a stamp that covers as much as possible from the galaxy and a good decision about which objects should be simultaneously modeled and which should be masked there are a list of things you must take care.
Coming to masking. As I learned from Marco Barden (Innsbruck) if an object is inside the isophotal radius of the galaxy it should be simultaneously modeled, otherwise it should be masked.
So, you need a correct header indicating the GAIN, RON and NCOMBINE, image in COUNTS and not COUNTS/SEC or ELECTRONS and the original sky level.
That is critical if you're using HST images. Multidrizzle, by default gives you the output image in counts/sec and sky subtracted. So you must multiply it by the exposure time and put back the sky level which is written in the header under "MDRIZSKY".
In the case of Carolina, her fits were giving a CHI^2 of about 500 ... putting a dumb sky back it went down to 5 ... so with the correct sky level it will go down to the proper value.
Labels: applications, GALFIT_hints, hi-z morph
Each 2 days? :-)
So! The same as yesterday.
Some attention to the database, checking parameters of the red sequences of the clusters and studying.
The examinations for the position in Rio are 13th and 14th of April ... gotta prepare everything until then.
Labels: applications, hi-z morph
Updating the database
Monday and tuesday, including train time was compiling a small research project for a job application, finishing the corrections on the morphology database, now finishing the missing parameters for some objects and working on red sequences and studying.
Some discussion about proposals for the next period and some nice discussions with Miguel Verdugo who's visiting ESO for a month. Discussions like in the old times :-)
Labels: applications, hi-z morph, life
