Authors list script One of my most important roles within HerMES has been to generate the LaTeX for the lists of authors and affiliations in the astronomy journal papers (p...
Update 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...
On Gaussian approximations You have a function that you want to approximate as an N-dimensional (multivariate) Gaussian (normal) distribution. What do you do? If you are me, you ...
HerMES point source catalogues Well, it's finally here: HerMES: point source catalogues from deep Herschel-SPIRE observations, by yours truly and lots of other people otherwise known ...
Generating LaTeX authors lists for MNRAS and A&A Okay, a bit boring, but as promised, here are some Python functions to generate LaTeX source for long authors lists for MNRAS and A&A.
MNRAS line wrapping in authors lists In case anyone else using the MNRAS LaTeX class has been tearing their hair out inserting line breaks manually into long author (and institution) lists,...
Bayesian number counts Here’s a simple bit of statistics for a Friday lunchtime. You count the number of galaxies in a certain area on the sky (with the galaxies satisfying so...
#NAM2010 opening Flew over most of GB today to Glasgow University for the National Astronomy Meeting (NAM) 2010. The opening speeches are taking place now (suppose that ...
Herschel for everyone I've just learned that the Herschel Science Archive has been opened up to the world, so any old Tom, Dick or Harry can download the data and start writi...
Astropython You (both of you) might well be interested in the new Astropython site, which looks excellent. Here’s the site’s own description: Research in astron...
Initial results from Herschel A bigger venue now, for the first scientific results from the Herschel Space Observatory. Not sure how much I can reveal right now (the presentations w...
Buenos días from Madrid! Day 1 of the Herschel Science Demonstration Phase Data Processing Workshop. Until Wednesday we will be based at ESAC, some 20 miles or so outside Madri...
Off to Madrid Just back from a week at RAL developing software related to the Herschel Space Observatory. I'll be off again tomorrow, this time to Madrid for a big He...
Astroinformatics Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundr...
Pixelating a 2-D Gaussian with Python They’re coming thick and fast now. Here’s a Python function to accompany the previous post. It’s not maximally efficient, but should make sense…
On the normalization of PRFs Yesterday I said that the PRF for a map in Jy/beam (or similar) should be normalized so that that peak is 1. But this is true only for an idealised (not...
Estimating the flux of a point source You have a map and you know what a point source looks like. How do you filter the map so that the value of each pixel is now the most likely flux of a p...
Visualizing noisy images You have an image. Each pixel has a value with some uncertainty. How do you visualize the uncertainty in each pixel?
Six days and counting Herschel (on the left) and Planck (on the right) are scheduled for launch at 2.12pm UK time this coming Thursday... At Sussex we're busy getting ready ...
PSFs in IDL Two methods of approximating a point-spread function in IDL: 1. StarFinder seems to do a great job at finding point sources in crowded fields. It includ...
Are we alone in the Universe? After “Do you want to be the next Patrick Moore?” and “I’m a Capricorn”, the most common response I get when I tell people I work in astronomy is, “Do...
Simulating the Universe Astronomers spend a lot of time making computer simulations of the Universe. Some discussion on The e-Astronomer's blog has set me thinking about why.....
Herschel Space Observatory PhD now submitted, I've just started a six-month contract working at Sussex on some software for the Herschel Space Observatory, which is due to be laun...
The science of galaxy formation… ...is the title of a provocative article by Gerry Gilmore(*) on today's astro-ph. There's a bit about the scientific method, such as: The appropriate sc...
Papers: your personal library of science Looking for a piece of software for your Mac that will allow you to: keep track of PDFs of academic papers, search for papers using Google Scholar, ADS...
UKIDSS paper submitted Well, the deed has been done, and the paper has finally been submitted to MNRAS and to astro-ph. You can read it if you really want to: Luminosity and s...
Galaxy Zoo: the independence of morphology and colour Galaxies come in two types: red, elliptical galaxies that reside in high-density regions, and blue, spiral galaxies that reside in low-density regions. ...
Evolution of Schechter function … so? This is some work in progress: K-band luminosity function from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey (LAS, black dots), showing the number of galaxies per unit ...
A galaxy being emitted by a star Why is the universe so crowded? This kind of thing is really messing up my data! Makes me want to work with simulations...
IDL code miscellany IDLdoc 3.0 (more info here) gives my badly-written bits of IDL the deceptive appearance of being well designed, useful and user-friendly. So I've made a...
UKIDSS at ESO Just back from my first visit to Garching (near Munich). ESO, to be more specific. The reason for the visit: a three-day workshop on Science from UKIDSS...
Filtering astro-ph with CosmoCoffee One of the things mentioned in Sarah Bridle's talk at YAM last week was a filter for arXiv.org provided by CosmoCoffee. I decided to sample it this week...
UKIDSS poster Last Friday was the RAS Young Astronomers Meeting up in Edinburgh. I presented a poster, ‘A census of K-band galaxies from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey,’ which I’ve just put online on my (very short!) publications page.
Stellarium If, like me, you know virtually nothing about astronomy, wouldn't know which way to look through a telescope, but would quite like to be able to identif...
Galaxy Zoo Galaxy Zoo is a project to get ordinary people (that's you) to help look through pictures of a million galaxies, labelling each one as a spiral galaxy, ...
Questions for the standard cosmological model ...it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established... The words of Albert Michelson, Nobel Prize-winning phy...