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Astrophysics Source Code Library

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[ascl:1302.009] IAS Stacking Library in IDL

This IDL library is designed to be used on astronomical images. Its main aim is to stack data to allow a statistical detection of faint signal, using a prior. For instance, you can stack 160um data using the positions of galaxies detected at 24um or 3.6um, or use WMAP sources to stack Planck data. It can estimate error bars using bootstrap, and it can perform photometry (aperture photometry, or PSF fitting, or other that you can plug). The IAS Stacking Library works with gnomonic projections (RA---TAN), and also with HEALPIX projection.

[ascl:1302.010] ICORE: Image Co-addition with Optional Resolution Enhancement

ICORE is a command-line driven co-addition, mosaicking, and resolution enhancement (HiRes) tool for creating science quality products from image data in FITS format and with World Coordinate System information following the FITS-WCS standard. It includes preparatory steps such as image background matching, photometric gain-matching, and pixel-outlier rejection. Co-addition and/or HiRes'ing can be performed in either the inertial WCS or in the rest frame of a moving object. Three interpolation methods are supported: overlap-area weighting, drizzle, and weighting by the detector Point Response Function (PRF). The latter enables the creation of matched-filtered products for optimal point-source detection, but most importantly allows for resolution enhancement using a spatially-dependent deconvolution method. This is a variant of the classic Richardson-Lucy algorithm with the added benefit to simultaneously register and co-add multiple images to optimize signal-to-noise and sampling of the instrumental PSF. It can assume real (or otherwise "flat") image priors, mitigate "ringing" artifacts, and assess the quality of image solutions using statistically-motivated convergence criteria. Uncertainties are also estimated and internally validated for all products. The software supports multithreading that can be configured for different architectures. Numerous example scripts are included (with test data) to co-add and/or HiRes image data from Spitzer-IRAC/MIPS, WISE, and Herschel-SPIRE.

[ascl:1302.011] GALA: Stellar atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances

GALA is a freely distributed Fortran code to derive the atmospheric parameters (temperature, gravity, microturbulent velocity and overall metallicity) and abundances for individual species of stellar spectra using the classical method based on the equivalent widths of metallic lines. The abundances of individual spectral lines are derived by using the WIDTH9 code developed by R. L. Kurucz. GALA is designed to obtain the best model atmosphere, by optimizing temperature, surface gravity, microturbulent velocity and metallicity, after rejecting the discrepant lines. Finally, it computes accurate internal errors for each atmospheric parameter and abundance. The code obtains chemical abundances and atmospheric parameters for large stellar samples quickly, thus making GALA an useful tool in the epoch of the multi-object spectrographs and large surveys.

[ascl:1302.012] ME(SSY)**2: Monte Carlo Code for Star Cluster Simulations

ME(SSY)**2 stands for “Monte-carlo Experiments with Spherically SYmmetric Stellar SYstems." This code simulates the long term evolution of spherical clusters of stars; it was devised specifically to treat dense galactic nuclei. It is based on the pioneering Monte Carlo scheme proposed by Hénon in the 70's and includes all relevant physical ingredients (2-body relaxation, stellar mass spectrum, collisions, tidal disruption, ldots). It is basically a Monte Carlo resolution of the Fokker-Planck equation. It can cope with any stellar mass spectrum or velocity distribution. Being a particle-based method, it also allows one to take stellar collisions into account in a very realistic way. This unique code, featuring most important physical processes, allows million particle simulations, spanning a Hubble time, in a few CPU days on standard personal computers and provides a wealth of data only rivalized by N-body simulations. The current version of the software requires the use of routines from the "Numerical Recipes in Fortran 77" (http://www.nrbook.com/a/bookfpdf.php).

[ascl:1302.013] NIFTY: A versatile Python library for signal inference

NIFTY (Numerical Information Field TheorY) is a versatile library enables the development of signal inference algorithms that operate regardless of the underlying spatial grid and its resolution. Its object-oriented framework is written in Python, although it accesses libraries written in Cython, C++, and C for efficiency. NIFTY offers a toolkit that abstracts discretized representations of continuous spaces, fields in these spaces, and operators acting on fields into classes. Thereby, the correct normalization of operations on fields is taken care of automatically. This allows for an abstract formulation and programming of inference algorithms, including those derived within information field theory. Thus, NIFTY permits rapid prototyping of algorithms in 1D and then the application of the developed code in higher-dimensional settings of real world problems. NIFTY operates on point sets, n-dimensional regular grids, spherical spaces, their harmonic counterparts, and product spaces constructed as combinations of those.

[ascl:1302.014] SYNMAG Photometry: Catalog-level Matched Colors of Extended Sources

SYNMAG is a tool for producing synthetic aperture magnitudes to enable fast matched photometry at the catalog level without reprocessing imaging data. Aperture magnitudes are the most widely tabulated flux measurements in survey catalogs; obtaining reliable, matched photometry for galaxies imaged by different observatories represents a key challenge in the era of wide-field surveys spanning more than several hundred square degrees. Methods such as flux fitting, profile fitting, and PSF homogenization followed by matched-aperture photometry are all computationally expensive. An alternative solution called "synthetic aperture photometry" exploits galaxy profile fits in one band to efficiently model the observed, point-spread-function-convolved light profile in other bands and predict the flux in arbitrarily sized apertures.

[ascl:1302.015] DisPerSE: Discrete Persistent Structures Extractor

DisPerSE is open source software for the identification of persistent topological features such as peaks, voids, walls and in particular filamentary structures within noisy sampled distributions in 2D, 3D. Using DisPerSE, structure identification can be achieved through the computation of the discrete Morse-Smale complex. The software can deal directly with noisy datasets via the concept of persistence (a measure of the robustness of topological features). Although developed for the study of the properties of filamentary structures in the cosmic web of galaxy distribution over large scales in the Universe, the present version is quite versatile and should be useful for any application where a robust structure identification is required, such as for segmentation or for studying the topology of sampled functions (for example, computing persistent Betti numbers). Currently, it can be applied can work indifferently on many kinds of cell complex (such as structured and unstructured grids, 2D manifolds embedded within a 3D space, discrete point samples using delaunay tesselation, and Healpix tesselations of the sphere). The only constraint is that the distribution must be defined over a manifold, possibly with boundaries.

[ascl:1302.016] XDQSO: Photometic quasar probabilities and redshifts

XDQSO, written in IDL, calculates photometric quasar probabilities to mimick SDSS-III’s BOSS quasar target selection or photometric redshifts for quasars, whether in three redshift ranges (z < 2.2; 2.2 leq z leq 3.5; z > 3.5) or arbitrary redshift ranges.

[ascl:1302.017] ESO-MIDAS: General tools for image processing and data reduction

The ESO-MIDAS system provides general tools for image processing and data reduction with emphasis on astronomical applications including imaging and special reduction packages for ESO instrumentation at La Silla and the VLT at Paranal. In addition it contains applications packages for stellar and surface photometry, image sharpening and decomposition, statistics, data fitting, data presentation in graphical form, and more.

[ascl:1301.001] PSFEx: Point Spread Function Extractor

PSFEx (“PSF Extractor”) extracts models of the Point Spread Function (PSF) from FITS images processed with SExtractor and measures the quality of images. The generated PSF models can be used for model-fitting photometry or morphological analyses.

[ascl:1212.001] Bonsai: N-body GPU tree-code

Bonsai is a gravitational N-body tree-code that runs completely on the GPU. This reduces the amount of time spent on communication with the CPU. The code runs on NVIDIA GPUs and on a GTX480 it is able to integrate ~2.8M particles per second. The tree construction and traverse algorithms are portable to many-core devices which have support for CUDA or OpenCL programming languages.

[ascl:1212.002] XPHOT: Estimation of properties of weak X-ray sources

XPHOT is an IDL implementation of a non-parametric method for estimating the apparent and intrinsic broad-band fluxes and absorbing X-ray column densities of weak X-ray sources. XPHOT is intended for faint sources with greater than ∼5-7 counts but fewer than 100-300 counts where parametric spectral fitting methods will be superior. This method is similar to the long-standing use of color-magnitude diagrams in optical and infrared astronomy, with X-ray median energy replacing color index and X-ray source counts replacing magnitude. Though XPHOT was calibrated for thermal spectra characteristic of stars in young stellar clusters, recalibration should be possible for some other classes of faint X-ray sources such as extragalactic active galactic nuclei.

[ascl:1212.003] MPWide: Light-weight communication library for distributed computing

MPWide is a light-weight communication library for distributed computing. It is specifically developed to allow message passing over long-distance networks using path-specific optimizations. An early version of MPWide was used in the Gravitational Billion Body Project to allow simulations across multiple supercomputers.

[ascl:1212.004] MOLIERE-5: Forward and inversion model for sub-mm wavelengths

MOLIERE-5 (Microwave Observation LIne Estimation and REtrieval) is a versatile forward and inversion model for the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths range and includes an inversion model. The MOLIERE-5 forward model includes modules for the calculation of absorption coefficients, radiative transfer, and instrumental characteristics. The radiative transfer model is supplemented by a sensitivity module for estimating the contribution to the spectrum of each catalog line at its center frequency enabling the model to effectively filter for small spectral lines. The instrument model consists of several independent modules, including the calculation of the convolution of spectra and weighting functions with the spectrometer response functions. The instrument module also provides several options for modeling of frequency-switched observations. The MOLIERE-5 inversion model calculates linear Optimal Estimation, a least-squares retrieval method which uses statistical apriori knowledge on the retrieved parameters for the regularization of ill-posed inversion problems and computes diagnostics such as the measurement and smoothing error covariance matrices along with contribution and averaging kernel functions.

[ascl:1212.005] General complex polynomial root solver

This general complex polynomial root solver, implemented in Fortran and further optimized for binary microlenses, uses a new algorithm to solve polynomial equations and is 1.6-3 times faster than the ZROOTS subroutine that is commercially available from Numerical Recipes, depending on application. The largest improvement, when compared to naive solvers, comes from a fail-safe procedure that permits skipping the majority of the calculations in the great majority of cases, without risking catastrophic failure in the few cases that these are actually required.

[ascl:1212.006] CosmoPMC: Cosmology sampling with Population Monte Carlo

CosmoPMC is a Monte-Carlo sampling method to explore the likelihood of various cosmological probes. The sampling engine is implemented with the package pmclib. It is called Population MonteCarlo (PMC), which is a novel technique to sample from the posterior. PMC is an adaptive importance sampling method which iteratively improves the proposal to approximate the posterior. This code has been introduced, tested and applied to various cosmology data sets.

[ascl:1212.007] WOLF: FITS file processor

WOLF processes FITS files and generates photometry files, annotated JPGs, opacity maps, background, transient detection and luminance changes detection. This software was used to process data for the Night Sky Live project.

[ascl:1212.008] SIR: Stokes Inversion based on Response functions

SIR is a general-purpose code capable of dealing with gradients of the physical quantities with height. It admits one and two-component model atmospheres. It allows the recovery of the stratification of the temperature, the magnetic field vector, and the line of sight velocity through the atmosphere, and the micro- and macroturbulence velocities - which are assumed to be constant with depth. It is based on the response functions, which enter a Marquardt nonlinear least-squares algorithm in a natural way. Response functions are calculated at the same time as the full radiative transfer equation for polarized light is integrated, which determines values of many free parameters in a reasonable computation time. SIR demonstrates high stability, accuracy, and uniqueness of results, even when simulated observations present signal-to-noise ratios of the order of the lowest acceptable values in real observations.

[ascl:1212.009] Aegean: Compact source finding in radio images

Aegean, written in python, finds compact sources within radio images by seeking out islands of pixels above a given threshold and then using the curvature of the image to determine how many Gaussian components should be used to describe the island. The Gaussian fitting is initiated with parameters determined from the curvature and intensity maps, and makes use of mpfit to perform a constrained fit. Aegean has been optimized for compact radio sources in images that have no diffuse background emission, but by pre-processing the images with a spatial filter, or by convolving an optical image with an appropriately small PSF, Aegean is able to produce excellent results in a range of applications.

[ascl:1212.010] Synth3: Non-magnetic spectrum synthesis code

Synth3 is a non-magnetic spectrum synthesis code. It works with model atmospheres in Kurucz format and VALD Sf line lists and features element stratification, molecular equilibrium and individual microturbulence for each line. Disk integration can be done with s3di which is included in the archive. Synth3 computes spectra emergent from the stellar atmospheres with a depth-dependent chemical composition if depth-dependent abundance is provided in the input model atmosphere file.

[ascl:1212.011] DrizzlePac: HST image software

DrizzlePac allows users to easily and accurately align and combine HST images taken at multiple epochs, and even with different instruments. It is a suite of supporting tasks for AstroDrizzle which includes:

- astrodrizzle to align and combine images
- tweakreg and tweakback for aligning images in different visits
- pixtopix transforms an X,Y pixel position to its pixel position after distortion corrections
- skytopix transforms sky coordinates to X,Y pixel positions. A reverse transformation can be done using the task pixtosky.

[ascl:1212.012] ddisk: Debris disk time-evolution

ddisk is an IDL script that calculates the time-evolution of a circumstellar debris disk. It calculates dust abundances over time for a debris-disk that is produced by a planetesimal disk that is grinding away due to collisional erosion.

[ascl:1212.013] EXSdetect: Extended X-ray Source Detection

EXSdetect is a python implementation of an X-ray source detection algorithm which is optimally designed to detected faint extended sources and makes use of Voronoi tessellation and Friend-of-Friend technique. It is a flexible tool capable of detecting extended sources down to the lowest flux levels attainable within instrumental limitations while maintaining robust photometry, high completeness, and low contamination, regardless of source morphology. EXSdetect was developed mainly to exploit the ever-increasing wealth of archival X-ray data, but is also ideally suited to explore the scientific capabilities of future X-ray facilities, with a strong focus on investigations of distant groups and clusters of galaxies.

[ascl:1212.014] Thrust: Productivity-Oriented Library for CUDA

Thrust is a parallel algorithms library which resembles the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). Thrust's high-level interface greatly enhances programmer productivity while enabling performance portability between GPUs and multicore CPUs. Interoperability with established technologies (such as CUDA, TBB, and OpenMP) facilitates integration with existing software.

[ascl:1212.015] TMAP: Tübingen NLTE Model-Atmosphere Package

The Tübingen NLTE Model-Atmosphere Package (TMAP) is a tool to calculate stellar atmospheres in spherical or plane-parallel geometry in hydrostatic and radiative equilibrium allowing departures from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) for the population of atomic levels. It is based on the Accelerated Lambda Iteration (ALI) method and is able to account for line blanketing by metals. All elements from hydrogen to nickel may be included in the calculation with model atoms which are tailored for the aims of the user.

[ascl:1211.001] S2LET: Fast wavelet analysis on the sphere

S2LET provides high performance routines for fast wavelet analysis of signals on the sphere. It uses the SSHT code (ascl:2207.034) built on the MW sampling theorem to perform exact spherical harmonic transforms on the sphere. The resulting wavelet transform implemented in S2LET is theoretically exact, i.e. a band-limited signal can be recovered from its wavelet coefficients exactly and the wavelet coefficients capture all the information. S2LET also supports the HEALPix sampling scheme, in which case the transforms are not theoretically exact but achieve good numerical accuracy. The core routines of S2LET are written in C and have interfaces in Matlab, IDL and Java. Real signals can be written to and read from FITS files and plotted as Mollweide projections.

[ascl:1211.002] FreeEOS: Equation of State for stellar interiors calculations

FreeEOS is a Fortran library for rapidly calculating the equation of state using an efficient free-energy minimization technique that is suitable for physical conditions in stellar interiors. Converged FreeEOS solutions can be reliably determined for the first time for physical conditions occurring in stellar models with masses between 0.1 M and the hydrogen-burning limit near 0.07 M and hot brown-dwarf models just below that limit. However, an initial survey of results for those conditions showed EOS discontinuities (plasma phase transitions) and other problems which will need to be addressed in future work by adjusting the interaction radii characterizing the pressure ionization used for the FreeEOS calculations.

[ascl:1211.003] WVT Binning: Spatially adaptive 2-D binning

WVT Binning is a spatially adaptive 2-dimensional binning algorithm designed to bin sparse X-ray data. It can handle background subtracted, exposure corrected data to produce intensity images, hardness ratio maps, or temperature maps. The algorithm is an extension of Cappellari & Copin's (2003) Voronoi binning code and uses Weighted Voronoi Tesselations (WVT) to produce a very compact binning structure with a constant S/N per bin. The bin size adjusts to the required resolution in single-pixel steps, which minimizes the scatter around the target S/N. The code is very versatile and can in principle be applied to any type of data. The user manual contains instructions on how to apply the WVT binning code to X-ray data and how to extend the algorithm to other problems.

[ascl:1211.004] CORRFIT: Cross-Correlation Routines

CORRFIT is a set of routines that use the cross-correlation method to extract parameters of the line-of-sight velocity distribution from galactic spectra and stellar templates observed on the same system. It works best when the broadening function is well sampled at the spectral resolution used (e.g. 200 km/s dispersion at 2 Angstrom resolution). Results become increasingly sensitive to the spectral match between galaxy and template if the broadening function is not well sampled. CORRFIT does not work well for dispersions less than the velocity sampling interval ('delta' in the code) unless the template is perfect.

[ascl:1211.005] C-m Emu: Concentration-mass relation emulator

The concentration-mass relation for dark matter-dominated halos is one of the essential results expected from a theory of structure formation. C-m Emu is a simple numerical code for the c-M relation as a function of cosmological parameters for wCDM models generates the best-fit power-law model for each redshift separately and then interpolate between the redshifts. This produces a more accurate answer at each redshift at the minimal cost of running a fast code for every c -M prediction instead of using one fitting formula. The emulator is constructed from 37 individual models, with three nested N-body gravity-only simulations carried out for each model. The mass range covered by the emulator is 2 x 10^{12} M_sun < M <10^{15} M_sun with a corresponding redshift range of z=0 -1. Over this range of mass and redshift, as well as the variation of cosmological parameters studied, the mean halo concentration varies from c ~ 2 to c ~ 8. The distribution of the concentration at fixed mass is Gaussian with a standard deviation of one-third of the mean value, almost independent of cosmology, mass, and redshift over the ranges probed by the simulations.

[ascl:1211.006] VorBin: Voronoi binning method

VorBin (Voronoi binning method) bins two-dimensional data to a constant signal-to-noise ratio per bin. It optimally solves the problem of preserving the maximum spatial resolution of general two-dimensional data, given a constraint on the minimum signal-to-noise ratio. The method is available in both IDL and Python.

[ascl:1210.001] GP2PCF: Brute-force computation of 2-point correlation functions

The two-point correlation function is a simple statistic that quantifies the clustering of a given distribution of objects. In studies of the large scale structure of the Universe, it is an important tool containing information about the matter clustering and the evolution of the Universe at different cosmological epochs. A classical application of this statistic is the galaxy-galaxy correlation function to find constraints on the parameter Omega_m or the location of the baryonic acoustic oscillation peak. This calculation, however, is very expensive in terms of computer power and Graphics Processing Units provide one solution for efficient analysis of the increasingly larger galaxy surveys that are currently taking place.

GP2PCF is a public code in CUDA for performing this computation; with a single GPU board it is possible to achieve 120-fold speedups with respect to a standard implementation in C running on a single CPU. With respect to other solutions such as k-trees the improvement is of a factor of a few retaining full precision. The speedup is comparable to running in parallel in a cluster of O(100) cores.

[ascl:1210.002] pPXF: Penalized Pixel-Fitting stellar kinematics extraction

pPXF extracts the stellar kinematics or stellar population from absorption-line spectra of galaxies using the Penalized Pixel-Fitting method (pPXF) developed by Cappellari & Emsellem (2004, PASP, 116, 138). Additional features implemented in the pPXF routine include:

  • Optimal template: Fitted together with the kinematics to minimize template-mismatch errors. Also useful to extract gas kinematics or derive emission-corrected line-strengths indexes. One can use synthetic templates to study the stellar population of galaxies via "Full Spectral Fitting" instead of using traditional line-strengths.
  • Regularization of templates weights: To reduce the noise in the recovery of the stellar population parameters and attach a physical meaning to the output weights assigned to the templates in term of the star formation history (SFH) or metallicity distribution of an individual galaxy.
  • Iterative sigma clipping: To clean the spectra from residual bad pixels or cosmic rays.
  • Additive/multiplicative polynomials: To correct low frequency continuum variations. Also useful for calibration purposes.

The code is available in IDL and in Python versions.

[ascl:1210.003] GOSSIP: SED fitting code

GOSSIP fits the electro-magnetic emission of an object (the SED, Spectral Energy Distribution) against synthetic models to find the simulated one that best reproduces the observed data. It builds-up the observed SED of an object (or a large sample of objects) combining magnitudes in different bands and eventually a spectrum; then it performs a chi-square minimization fitting procedure versus a set of synthetic models. The fitting results are used to estimate a number of physical parameters like the Star Formation History, absolute magnitudes, stellar mass and their Probability Distribution Functions.

[ascl:1210.004] EZ: A Tool For Automatic Redshift Measurement

EZ (Easy-Z) estimates redshifts for extragalactic objects. It compares the observed spectrum with a set of (user given) spectral templates to find out the best value for the redshift. To accomplish this task, it uses a highly configurable set of algorithms. EZ is easily extendible with new algorithms. It is implemented as a set of C programs and a number of python classes. It can be used as a standalone program, or the python classes can be directly imported by other applications.

[ascl:1210.005] SGNAPS: Software for Graphical Navigation, Analysis and Plotting of Spectra

SGNAPS allows the user to plot a one-dimensional spectrum, together with the corresponding two-dimensional and a reference spectrum (for example the sky spectrum). This makes it possible to check on the reality of spectral features that are present in the one-dimensional spectrum, which could be due to bad sky subtraction or fringing residuals. It is also possible to zoom in and out all three spectra, edit the one-dimensional spectrum, smooth it with a simple square window function, measure the signal to noise over a selected wavelength interval, and fit the position of a selected spectral line. SGNAPS also allows the astronomer to obtain quick redshift estimates by providing a tool to fit or mark the position of a spectral line, and a function that will compute a list of possible redshifts based on a list of known lines in galaxy spectra. SGNAPS is derived from the plotting tools of VIPGI and contains almost all of their capabilities.

NOTE: SGNAPS functionality has been transitioned to EZ.

[ascl:1210.006] TA-DA: A Tool for Astrophysical Data Analysis

TA-DA is a pre-compiled IDL widget-based application which greatly simplifies and improves the analysis of stellar photometric data in comparison with theoretical models and allows the derivation of stellar parameters from multi-band photometry. It is flexible and can address a number of problems, from the interpolation of stellar models or sets of stellar physical parameters in general to the computation of synthetic photometry in arbitrary filters or units. It also analyzes observed color-magnitude diagrams and allows a Bayesian derivation of stellar parameters (and extinction) based on multi-band data.

[ascl:1210.007] FLUKA: Fully integrated particle physics Monte Carlo simulation package

FLUKA (FLUktuierende KAskade) is a general-purpose tool for calculations of particle transport and interactions with matter. FLUKA can simulate with high accuracy the interaction and propagation in matter of about 60 different particles, including photons and electrons from 1 keV to thousands of TeV, neutrinos, muons of any energy, hadrons of energies up to 20 TeV (up to 10 PeV by linking FLUKA with the DPMJET code) and all the corresponding antiparticles, neutrons down to thermal energies and heavy ions. The program, written in Fortran, can also transport polarised photons (e.g., synchrotron radiation) and optical photons. Time evolution and tracking of emitted radiation from unstable residual nuclei can be performed online.

[ascl:1210.008] Rockstar: Phase-space halo finder

Rockstar (Robust Overdensity Calculation using K-Space Topologically Adaptive Refinement) identifies dark matter halos, substructure, and tidal features. The approach is based on adaptive hierarchical refinement of friends-of-friends groups in six phase-space dimensions and one time dimension, which allows for robust (grid-independent, shape-independent, and noise-resilient) tracking of substructure. Our method is massively parallel (up to 10^5 CPUs) and runs on the largest current simulations (>10^10 particles) with high efficiency (10 CPU hours and 60 gigabytes of memory required per billion particles analyzed). Rockstar offers significant improvement in substructure recovery as compared to several other halo finders.

[ascl:1210.009] PAHFIT: Properties of PAH Emission

PAHFIT is an IDL tool for decomposing Spitzer IRS spectra of PAH emission sources, with a special emphasis on the careful recovery of ambiguous silicate absorption, and weak, blended dust emission features. PAHFIT is primarily designed for use with full 5-35 micron Spitzer low-resolution IRS spectra. PAHFIT is a flexible tool for fitting spectra, and you can add or disable features, compute combined flux bands, change fitting limits, etc., without changing the code.

PAHFIT uses a simple, physically-motivated model, consisting of starlight, thermal dust continuum in a small number of fixed temperature bins, resolved dust features and feature blends, prominent emission lines (which themselves can be blended with dust features), as well as simple fully-mixed or screen dust extinction, dominated by the silicate absorption bands at 9.7 and 18 microns. Most model components are held fixed or are tightly constrained. PAHFIT uses Drude profiles to recover the full strength of dust emission features and blends, including the significant power in the wings of the broad emission profiles. This means the resulting feature strengths are larger (by factors of 2-4) than are recovered by methods which estimate the underlying continuum using line segments or spline curves fit through fiducial wavelength anchors.

[ascl:1210.010] CALCLENS: Curved-sky grAvitational Lensing for Cosmological Light conE simulatioNS

CALCLENS, written in C and employing widely available software libraries, efficiently computes weak gravitational lensing shear signals from large N-body light cone simulations over a curved sky. The algorithm properly accounts for the sky curvature and boundary conditions, is able to produce redshift-dependent shear signals including corrections to the Born approximation by using multiple-plane ray tracing, and properly computes the lensed images of source galaxies in the light cone. The key feature of this algorithm is a new, computationally efficient Poisson solver for the sphere that combines spherical harmonic transform and multgrid methods. As a result, large areas of sky (~10,000 square degrees) can be ray traced efficiently at high-resolution using only a few hundred cores on widely available machines. Coupled with realistic galaxy populations placed in large N-body light cone simulations, CALCLENS is ideally suited for the construction of synthetic weak lensing shear catalogs to be used to test for systematic effects in data analysis procedures for upcoming large-area sky surveys.

[ascl:1210.011] Consistent Trees: Gravitationally Consistent Halo Catalogs and Merger Trees for Precision Cosmology

Consistent Trees generates merger trees and halo catalogs which explicitly ensure consistency of halo properties (mass, position, velocity, radius) across timesteps. It has demonstrated the ability to improve both the completeness (through detecting and inserting otherwise missing halos) and purity (through detecting and removing spurious objects) of both merger trees and halo catalogs. Consistent Trees is able to robustly measure the self-consistency of halo finders and to directly measure the uncertainties in halo positions, halo velocities, and the halo mass function for a given halo finder based on consistency between snapshots in cosmological simulations.

[ascl:1210.012] SearchCal: The JMMC Evolutive Search Calibrator Tool

SearchCal builds an evolutive catalog of stars suitable as calibrators within any given user-defined angular distance and magnitude around a scientific target. SearchCal can select suitable bright calibration stars (V ≤ 10; K ≤ 5.0) for obtaining the ultimate precision of current interferometric instruments like the VLTI and faint calibration stars up to K ~ 15 around the scientific target. Star catalogs available at the CDS are searched via web requests and provide the useful astrometric and photometric informations for selecting calibrators. The missing photometries are computed with an accuracy of about 0.1 mag. The stellar angular diameter is estimated with a precision of about 10% through newly determined surface-brightness versus color-index relations based on the I, J, H and K magnitudes. For each star the squared visibility is computed taking into account the central wavelength and the maximum baseline of the predicted observations.

[ascl:1210.013] ConvPhot: A profile-matching algorithm for precision photometry

ConvPhot measures colors between two images having different resolutions. ConvPhot is designed to work especially for faint galaxies, accurately measuring colors in relatively crowded fields. It makes full use of the spatial and morphological information contained in the highest quality images to analyze multiwavelength data with inhomogeneous image quality.
Written in 2007, ConvPhot has been superseded by T-PHOT (ascl:1609.001)

[ascl:1210.014] TRIP: General computer algebra system for celestial mechanics

TRIP is an interactive computer algebra system that is devoted to perturbation series computations, and specially adapted to celestial mechanics. Its development started in 1988, as an upgrade of the special purpose FORTRAN routines elaborated by J. Laskar for the demonstration of the chaotic behavior of the Solar System. TRIP is a mature and efficient tool for handling multivariate generalized power series, and embeds two kernels, a symbolic and a numerical kernel. This numerical kernel communicates with Gnuplot or Grace to plot the graphics and allows one to plot the numerical evaluation of symbolic objects.

[ascl:1210.015] Tempo2: Pulsar Timing Package

Tempo2 is a pulsar timing package developed to be used both for general pulsar timing applications and also for pulsar timing array research in which data-sets from multiple pulsars need to be processed simultaneously. It was initially developed by George Hobbs and Russell Edwards as part of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array project. Tempo2 is based on the original Tempo (ascl:1509.002) code and can be used (from the command-line) in a similar fashion. It is very versatile and can be extended by plugins.

[ascl:1210.016] Specview: 1-D spectral visualization and analysis of astronomical spectrograms

Specview is a tool for 1-D spectral visualization and analysis of astronomical spectrograms. Written in Java, it is capable of reading all the Hubble Space Telescope spectral data formats as well as data from several other instruments (such as IUE, FUSE, ISO, FORS and SDSS), preview spectra from MAST, and data from generic FITS and ASCII tables. It can read data from Virtual Observatory servers, and read and write spectrogram data in Virtual Observatory SED format. It can also read files in the SPC Galactic format used in the chemistry field. Once ingested, data can be plotted and examined with a large selection of custom settings. Specview supports instrument-specific data quality handling, flexible spectral units conversions, custom plotting attributes, plot annotations, tiled plots, hardcopy to JPEG files and PostScript file or printer, etc. Specview can be used to build wide-band SEDs, overplotting or combining data from the same astronomical source taken with different instruments and/or spectral bands. Data can be further processed with averaging, splicing, detrending, and Fourier filtering tools. Specview has a spectral model fitting capability that enables the user to work with multi-component models (including user-defined models) and fit models to data.

[ascl:1210.017] McPHAC: McGill Planar Hydrogen Atmosphere Code

The McGill Planar Hydrogen Atmosphere Code (McPHAC) v1.1 calculates the hydrostatic equilibrium structure and emergent spectrum of an unmagnetized hydrogen atmosphere in the plane-parallel approximation at surface gravities appropriate for neutron stars. McPHAC incorporates several improvements over previous codes for which tabulated model spectra are available: (1) Thomson scattering is treated anisotropically, which is shown to result in a 0.2%-3% correction in the emergent spectral flux across the 0.1-5 keV passband; (2) the McPHAC source code is made available to the community, allowing it to be scrutinized and modified by other researchers wishing to study or extend its capabilities; and (3) the numerical uncertainty resulting from the discrete and iterative solution is studied as a function of photon energy, indicating that McPHAC is capable of producing spectra with numerical uncertainties <0.01%. The accuracy of the spectra may at present be limited to ~1%, but McPHAC enables researchers to study the impact of uncertain inputs and additional physical effects, thereby supporting future efforts to reduce those inaccuracies. Comparison of McPHAC results with spectra from one of the previous model atmosphere codes (NSA) shows agreement to lsim1% near the peaks of the emergent spectra. However, in the Wien tail a significant deficit of flux in the spectra of the previous model is revealed, determined to be due to the previous work not considering large enough optical depths at the highest photon frequencies. The deficit is most significant for spectra with T eff < 105.6 K, though even there it may not be of much practical importance for most observations.

[ascl:1210.018] Systemic Console: Advanced analysis of exoplanetary data

Systemic Console is a tool for advanced analysis of exoplanetary data. It comprises a graphical tool for fitting radial velocity and transits datasets and a library of routines for non-interactive calculations. Among its features are interactive plotting of RV curves and transits, combined fitting of RV and transit timing (primary and secondary), interactive periodograms and FAP estimation, and bootstrap and MCMC error estimation. The console package includes public radial velocity and transit data.

[ascl:1210.019] QFitsView: FITS file viewer

QFitsView is a FITS file viewer that can display one, two, and three-dimensional FITS files. It has three modes of operation, depending of what kind of data is being displayed. One-dimensional data are shown in an x-y plot. Two-dimensional images are shown in the main window. Three-dimensional data cubes can be displayed in a variety of ways, with the third dimension shown as a x-y plot at the bottom of the image display. QFitsView was written in C++ and uses the Qt widget library, which makes it available for all major platforms: Windows, MAC OS X, and many Unix variants.

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