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Jessica

FITS images with catalog overlays

by Jessica March 17, 2010

I have been using ds9 to display images primarily due to inertia. I like the catalog tool for existing catalogs available online; but I wish there were a way to use custom catalog files without RA and Dec (just pixel coordinates) as well. I commonly resort to making ds9 region files, but this requires knowing [...]

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Fourier Transforms of Images in Python

by Jessica March 3, 2010

There are many applications for taking fourier transforms of images (noise filtering, searching for small structures in diffuse galaxies, etc.). I wanted to point out some of the python capabilities that I have found useful in my particular application, which is to calculate the power spectrum of an image (for later separation of the distribution [...]

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3D Plotting in Python with matplotlib mplot3d

by Jessica February 1, 2010

I recently needed to do some simple 3D plotting in python. The strongest choice as discussed on the web is Mayavi, which is part of the Enthought Python distribution. However, I have a previous python distribution already installed (via scisoft) with all of my favorite packages updated to the latest and greatest versions (e.g. matplotlib, [...]

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Introducing the AstroBetter Wiki

by Jessica January 27, 2010

As part of our efforts to “astro better” we have started a new wiki. This wiki was originally hosted at MacSingularity but has now been migrated over and substantially expanded.  You can get to the wiki from the menu bar above. Unlike the blog, anyone can register and edit the wiki content. We will frequently update the [...]

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Snow Leopard is Here

by Jessica August 28, 2009

The latest and greatest version of Mac OS X, dubbed Snow Leopard, is here. This is likely to be  a good release for astronomers as the OS has been trimmed down to boost performance overall and to give you back about 7 Gbytes of disk space. However, only Intel Macs are supported. Any early adopters [...]

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DS9 and Remote Files

by Jessica August 12, 2009

For the longest time, one of my major computing hurdles has been to figure out the best approach for viewing remote FITS files with SAOImage DS9. Currently, using DS9 over ssh is painfully slow, if not impossible for interactive color scaling for example. So I have often resorted to copying files to my local machine [...]

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Connecting: Video, Voice, and Text ChatiC

by Jessica June 11, 2009

There are now many different options for “meeting” with people remotely. This includes discussions over text , voice, video, or even screen sharing. I typically use iChat and have been very impressed with the screen sharing features in particular. However, there are other options for connecting that may work better behind finicky firewalls, connecting with [...]

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Scisoft OSX 2009.5.2 Released

by Jessica May 18, 2009

For those of you who use scisoft, IRAF, PyRAF, Python, etc. there has been an update of the Scisoft package for Macs. This package is a very nice way to install some of the most commonly used astronomy software tools (at least in optical/IR). The Urania blog as a breakdown of some of the updates:
Urania [...]

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