Regular visitors to [what was] my boring technical blog, may be forgiven for thinking that nothing is going on. This is my fourth post here in two years, so that's an average of one post every eight months (think about it!). Now, I do want this blog to be boring in content (most people would think I'm succeeding in that), but not necessarily boring in that I never post anything. So here's an attempt to bring things up to speed...
What have I been doing for the past few years? Since October 2008 I've been working on data processing for the Herschel Space Observatory. In terms of the data, I've done a lot with HerMES, but more recently the focus has been on the software, working on a big Herschel software package, HIPE (about, download). As such—and much to my horror—I seem to be becoming a software developer. Java, to be more specific. Here are some things I've been working on recently:
- Point source extraction: SUSSEXtractor and DAOPHOT.
- Making a map from timelines, simultaneously convolving with a kernel: convolutionMapper (or here).
- Correcting the pointing (astrometry) of an image, with respect to another image or source positions: astrometryFix.