Astronomical software

Here are a few applications I have written for the use in astronomical environments. They have been written as need arises, mainly due to my research, and while I was at telescopes.

ASTRA

The most important project I am working on are calibration routines for the ASTRA project. This will be an automated telescope, which surveys the sky obtaining absolute fluxes of objects. The project requires highly robust software, to be used in an automated manner.

I have some examples of synthesised spectra and results from the ASTRA calibration routines.

The first plot is a high-resolution spectrum of vega. This is what is expected for a primary calibrator, after the atmospheric extinction has been removed.
The second plot is a separate low-resolution spectrum taken from a different source, which has already been calibrated and has units of absolute flux. This is used to match the previous spectrum to.
The third plot is the instrument response calculated from these two previous spectra.
And the fourth plot is a calibrated spectrum of vega, with units of absolute flux.
After the instrument response has been calculated from the primary calibrator (Vega in this example), it can be applied to obtain absolute fluxes for other objects. This plot is an example of a second synthesised source, calibrated from our work on Vega.

Data reduction sorting

rows2cols-1.0.1.tar.gz reverses the rows and columns in a data file. It is written in c++ and doesn't use the array routines. I wanted to see if I could write it using nothing more than an extendable list of vectors of vectors. It works with variable space specifiers and tabs between the data, and also with missing data in the array. Not bad for 70 lines of code!

Astronomy Picture of the Day daemon

For fun, this programme automatically grabs the Astronomy picture of the day and displays it on the root window of an x-display.

apodd-1.0 tar gzipped file.
apodd.1 html man page.

Astronomy C library

This is a library which some of my programmes depend on. It is a collection of useful routines for in astronomical situations.

Astro library 0.1.0 source tar file
Function manpages:
- bsmear.3 in html format.
- hour_angle.3 in html format.
- dtor.3 in html format.
- b10tob60.3 in html format.
- b60tob10.3 in html format.

Bandwidth smearing calculator

This gives the reduction in intensity for a source, offset from the phase-centre of a radio interferomerty observation. It requires the astro library above.

Bandwidth v0.3 tar gzipped file.

Binary star ephemeris calculator

A curses programme which calculates the phase of a binary system.

ephemeris-0.1 tar gzipped file

Heliocentric Jullian Date calculator

This programme is best described in a separate page I wrote about it: HJD calculator

A binary clock with led lights

This is not an astronomical programme, but I thought it was worth putting here. The code was written to run under WindowMaker, but it will run under any X-windows window manager (probably!).

Dotclock 1.0 tar file

A laptop power monitor

Again, this is not astronomical, but is another of my WindowMaker dockable applications.

Apm 0.1 tar file

Last Updated: 31 October 2002. Richard Ogley