Tag Archive
amateur astronomy awk bash b[e] supergiant cartoon conference convert evolved star exoplanet fedora figaro fits fun galaxy iraf large magellanic cloud latex linux lmc machine learning magellanic clouds massive star matplotlib meteor mypaper paper peblo photometry planet pro-am pyraf python red supergiant scisoft skinakas observatory small magellanic cloud smc spectroscopy starlink talk ubuntu university of crete video x-ray yellow hypergiant
Digitizing (some) older observations of rho Cassiopeia
In the old days observations were not coming in such convenient formats like machine readable tables or though Vizier catalogs. There were written in text within the papers. So, for today’s standards it is a bit frustrating to find data in this format when you need them. The way to digitize them can be automated today but still some manual treatment may be needed.
Anyways…this whole introduction was made to justify somehow this post. I found myself trying to include some data to build a light curve for rho Cassiopeia, and in particular V measurements around its outburst in 1986. Zsoldos & Percy (1991) and Leiker & Hoff (1987) are two papers with about 70-80 observations each. The V magnitudes were given either directly or as a difference with a standard star. I have done all the necessary … eye processing to “copy” all the observations form the two papers to two separate simple ascii files each one containing the Julian Data, the magnitude, and its error (if available).
So, if you ever (..!) find yourself trying to do the same thing, just use the following files ! Enjoy!
A FOSSCOMM talk on Openess in Astronomy
On the previous weekend (October 13-14, 2018) the 11th Free and Open Source Software Communities Meeting was held in Heraklion of Crete (Greece). This is the Greek conference of the communities that develop free and open source software (such as Mozilla, Fegora, etc.). Although the meeting focuses on programmers and students it is open to all parties with a strong interest in open processes including other areas beyond just the software, such as hardware, society, economy, etc. Starting in 2008, it has been organized in 6 different cities so far (but not in Heraklion!), gathering a few hundred participants each time.
With such a diverse and different audience we (myself, Antonis Manousakis, and Eva Ntormousi) thought that it would be a great opportunity to present our (relatively biased) collected experience of these processed and applications from the modern research in Astronomy. So the title and the corresponding abstract was:
“Examples of openess in Astronomy”
Grigoris Maravelias, Antonis Manousakis, Eva Ntormousi
Traditionally Astronomy is a collaborative science in the sense that many researchers collaborate to observe a phenomenon, and they share their observations for further analysis and interpretation. Building upon this tradition many observatories today make available their observations so that modern astronomers have access to large datasets. Additionally, the technological advance of the instruments allows the observation of the Universe almost at the entire electromagnetic spectrum, even at the very recently confirmed gravitational waves. Thus, the modern astronomers are not only required to understand the Astrophysics behind these huge datasets but often they are called to develop the own necessary tools to conduct their research. Given the knowledge and the vast volume of data available today the collaborations are, more than ever, vital (especially with the forthcoming large projects that are currently built, e.g. 30m telescopes). In the framework of modern Astronomy we are going to present successful examples of how open approach has been applied.
While presenting openess in Astronomy, during the Free and Open Source Software Community Meeting of 2018 in Heraklion, Greece. [Copyright 2018 Pierros Papadeas, CC BY-SA-NC]
Openess in Astronomy v1.0 (FOSSCOMM talk in pdf, in Greek)
This particular talk is released under the CC-BY-SA license, so we are going to provide all necessary material along with the presentation. Although in Greek, most probably an english version will become also available in the future.
UPDATE 2019/06/24:
– After some time I managed to put all the material of this talk under a github repository: https://github.com/gmaravel/OpeningAstronomy This will the place where I will put everything related with this subject in an effort to promote more Openness in Astronomy. Although this talk is actually in Greek, I will updated with an English version also.
– The video from the talk itself (in Greek though…) is available now here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmYRb7U2s4A
