SkyCat is a tool that combines visualization of images and access to catalogs and archive data for astronomy. The tool, developed in Tcl/Tk, was originally conceived as a demo of the capabilities of the class library that was developed for the VLT. The Skycat sources currently consist of five packages:

• Tclutil - Generic Tcl and C++ utilities
• Astrotcl - Astronomical Tcl and C++ utilities
• RTD - Real-time Display classes and widgets
• Catlib - Catalog library and widgets
• Skycat - Skycat application and library package

All of the required packages are always included in the tarfile.

A radiative transfer code designed to solve the radiative transfer and statistical equilibrium equations in spherical geometry. It has been designed for application to W-R stars, O stars, and Luminous Blue-Variables. CMFGEN allows fundamental parameters such as effective temperatures, stellar radii and stellar luminosities to be determined. It can provide constraints on mass-loss rates, and allow abundance determinations for a wide range of atomic species. Further it can provide accurate energy distributions, and hence ionizing fluxes, which can be used as input for codes which model the spectra of HII regions and ring nebular.

TLUSTY is a user-oriented package written in FORTRAN77 for modeling stellar atmospheres and accretion disks and wide range of spectroscopic diagnostics. In the program's maximum configuration, the user may start from scratch and calculate a model atmosphere of a chosen degree of complexity, and end with a synthetic spectrum in a wavelength region of interest for an arbitrary stellar rotation and an arbitrary instrumental profile. The user may also model the vertical structure of annuli of an accretion disk.

Synspec is a user-oriented package written in FORTRAN for modeling stellar atmospheres and for stellar spectroscopic diagnostics. It assumes an existing model atmosphere, calculated previously with Tlusty or taken from the literature (for instance, from the Kurucz grid of models). The opacity sources (continua, atomic and molecular lines) are fully specified by the user. An arbitrary stellar rotation and instrumental profile can be applied to the synthetic spectrum.

MOKA simulates the gravitational lensing signal from cluster-sized haloes. This algorithm implements recent results from numerical simulations to create realistic lenses with properties independent of numerical resolution and can be used for studies of the strong lensing cross section in dependence of halo structure.

Jupiter is a multidimensional astrophysical hydrocode. It is based on a Godunov method, and it is parallelized with MPI. The mesh geometry can either be cartesian, cylindrical or spherical. It allows mesh refinement and includes special features adapted to the description of planets embedded in disks and nearly steady states.

The IMCAT software was developed initially to do faint galaxy photometry for weak lensing studies, and provides a fairly complete set of tools for this kind of work. Unlike most packages for doing data analysis, the tools are standalone unix commands which you can invoke from the shell, via shell scripts or from perl scripts. The tools are arranges in a tree of directories. One main branch is the ’imtools’. These deal only with fits files. The most important imtool is the ’image calculator’ ’ic’ which allows one to do rather general operations on fits images. A second branch is the ’catools’ which operate only on catalogues. The key cattool is ’lc’; this effectively defines the format of IMCAT catalogues, and allows one to do very general operations on and filtering of such catalogues. A third branch is the ’imcattools’. These tend to be much more specialised than the cattools and imcattools and are focussed on faint galaxy photometry.

Current and upcoming wide-field, ground-based, broad-band imaging surveys promise to address a wide range of outstanding problems in galaxy formation and cosmology. Several such uses of ground-based data, especially weak gravitational lensing, require highly precise measurements of galaxy image statistics with careful correction for the effects of the point-spread function (PSF). The SHERA (SHEar Reconvolution Analysis) software simulates ground-based imaging data with realistic galaxy morphologies and observing conditions, starting from space-based data (from COSMOS, the Cosmological Evolution Survey) and accounting for the effects of the space-based PSF. This code simulates ground-based data, optionally with a weak lensing shear applied, in a model-independent way using a general Fourier space formalism. The utility of this pipeline is that it allows for a precise, realistic assessment of systematic errors due to the method of data processing, for example in extracting weak lensing galaxy shape measurements or galaxy radial profiles, given user-supplied observational conditions and real galaxy morphologies. Moreover, the simulations allow for the empirical test of error estimates and determination of parameter degeneracies, via generation of many noise maps. The public release of this software, along with a large sample of cleaned COSMOS galaxy images (corrected for charge transfer inefficiency), should enable upcoming ground-based imaging surveys to achieve their potential in the areas of precision weak lensing analysis, galaxy profile measurement, and other applications involving detailed image analysis.

This code is no longer maintained and has been superseded by GalSim (ascl:1402.009).

WCSLIB is a C library, supplied with a full set of Fortran wrappers, that implements the "World Coordinate System" (WCS) standard in FITS (Flexible Image Transport System). It also includes a PGPLOT-based routine, PGSBOX, for drawing general curvilinear coordinate graticules and a number of utility programs.

Galacticus is designed to solve the physics involved in the formation of galaxies within the current standard cosmological framework. It is of a type of model known as “semi-analytic” in which the numerous complex non-linear physics involved are solved using a combination of analytic approximations and empirical calibrations from more detailed, numerical solutions. Models of this type aim to begin with the initial state of the Universe (specified shortly after the Big Bang) and apply physical principles to determine the properties of galaxies in the Universe at later times, including the present day. Typical properties computed include the mass of stars and gas in each galaxy, broad structural properties (e.g. radii, rotation speeds, geometrical shape etc.), dark matter and black hole contents, and observable quantities such as luminosities, chemical composition etc.

Gaepsi is a PYTHON extension for visualizing cosmology simulations produced by Gadget. Visualization is the most important facet of Gaepsi, but it also allows data analysis on GADGET simulations with its growing number of physics related subroutines and constants. Unlike mesh based scheme, SPH simulations are directly visible in the sense that a splatting process is required to produce raster images from the simulations. Gaepsi produces images of 2-dimensional line-of-sight projections of the simulation. Scalar fields and vector fields are both supported.

Besides the traditional way of slicing a simulation, Gaepsi also has built-in support of 'Survey-like' domain transformation proposed by Carlson & White. An improved implementation is used in Gaepsi. Gaepsi both implements an interactive shell for plotting and exposes its API for batch processing. When complied with OpenMP, Gaepsi automatically takes the advantage of the multi-core computers. In interactive mode, Gaepsi is capable of producing images of size up to 32000 x 32000 pixels. The user can zoom, pan and rotate the field with a command in on the finger tip. The interactive mode takes full advantages of matplotlib's rich annotating, labeling and image composition facilities. There are also built-in commands to add objects that are commonly used in cosmology simulations to the figures.

The study of stellar populations in galaxies is entering a new era with the availability of large and high quality databases of both observed galactic spectra and state-of-the-art evolutionary synthesis models. The power of spectral synthesis can be investigated as a mean to estimate physical properties of galaxies. Spectral synthesis is nothing more than the decomposition of an observed spectrum in terms of a superposition of a base of simple stellar populations of various ages and metallicities, producing astrophysically interesting output such as the star-formation and chemical enrichment histories of a galaxy, its extinction and velocity dispersion. This is what the STARLIGHT spectral synthesis code does.

PÉGASE (Projet d'Étude des GAlaxies par Synthèse Évolutive) is a code to compute the spectral evolution of galaxies. The evolution of the stars, gas and metals is followed for a law of star formation and a stellar initial mass function. The stellar evolutionary tracks extend from the main sequence to the white dwarf stage. The emission of the gas in HII regions is also taken into account. The main improvement in version 2 is the use of evolutionary tracks of different metallicities (from 10-4 to 5×solar). The effect of extinction by dust is also modelled using a radiative transfer code. PÉGASE.2 uses the BaSeL library of stellar spectra and can therefore synthesize low-resolution (R~200) ultraviolet to near-infrared spectra of Hubble sequence galaxies as well as of starbursts.

PÉGASE-HR is a code aimed at computing synthetic evolutive optical spectra of galaxies with a very high resolution (R=10 000, or dlambda=0.55) in the range Lambda=[4000, 6800] Angstroms. PÉGASE-HR is the result of combining the code PÉGASE.2 with the high-resolution stellar library ÉLODIE. This code can also be used at low resolution (R=200) over the range covered by the BaSeL library (from far UV to the near IR), and then produces the same results as PÉGASE.2. In PEGASE-HR, the BaSeL library is replaced by a grid of spectra interpolated from the high-resolution ÉLODIE library of stellar spectra. The ÉLODIE library is a stellar database of 1959 spectra for 1503 stars, observed with the echelle spectrograph ÉLODIE on the 193 cm telescope at the Observatoire de Haute Provence.

LePHARE is a set of Fortran commands to compute photometric redshifts and to perform SED fitting. The latest version includes new features with FIR fitting and a more complete treatment of physical parameters and uncertainties based on PÉGASE and Bruzual & Charlot population synthesis models. The program is based on a simple chi2 fitting method between the theoretical and observed photometric catalogue. A simulation program is also available in order to generate realistic multi-colour catalogues taking into account observational effects.

From a photometric catalogue, hyperz finds the redshift of each object by means of a standard SED fitting procedure, i.e. comparing the observed magnitudes with the expected ones, computed from template Spectral Energy Distributions. The set of templates used in the minimization procedure (age, metallicity, reddening, absorption in the Lyman forest, ...) is studied in detail, through both real and simulated data. The expected accuracy of photometric redshifts, as well as the fraction of catastrophic identifications and wrong detections, is given as a function of the redshift range, the set of filters considered, and the photometric accuracy. Special attention is paid to the results expected from real data.

Photometric redshift estimation is becoming an increasingly important technique, although the currently existing methods present several shortcomings which hinder their application. Most of those drawbacks are efficiently eliminated when Bayesian probability is consistently applied to this problem. The use of prior probabilities and Bayesian marginalization allows the inclusion of valuable information, e.g. the redshift distributions or the galaxy type mix, which is often ignored by other methods. In those cases when the a priori information is insufficient, it is shown how to `calibrate' the prior distributions, using even the data under consideration. There is an excellent agreement between the 108 HDF spectroscopic redshifts and the predictions of the method, with a rms error Delta z/(1+z_spec) = 0.08 up to z<6 and no systematic biases nor outliers. The results obtained are more reliable than those of standard techniques even when the latter include near-IR colors. The Bayesian formalism developed here can be generalized to deal with a wide range of problems which make use of photometric redshifts, e.g. the estimation of individual galaxy characteristics as the metallicity, dust content, etc., or the study of galaxy evolution and the cosmological parameters from large multicolor surveys. Finally, using Bayesian probability it is possible to develop an integrated statistical method for cluster mass reconstruction which simultaneously considers the information provided by gravitational lensing and photometric redshifts.

TITAN is a general-purpose radiation hydrodynamics code developed at the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics (NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). TITAN solves the coupled sets of radiation transfer and fluid dynamics equations on an adaptive mesh in one spatial dimension.

STELLA is a one-dimensional multi-group radiation hydrodynamics code. STELLA incorporates implicit hydrodynamics coupled to a multi-group non-equilibrium radiative transfer for modeling SN II-L light curves. The non-equilibrium description of radiation is crucial for this problem since the presupernova envelope may be of low mass and very dilute. STELLA implicitly treats time dependent equations of the angular moments of intensity averaged over a frequency bin. Local thermodynamic equilibrium is assumed to determine the ionization levels of materials.

RADICAL is a multi-purpose 2-D radiative transfer code for axi-symmetric circumstellar (or circum-black-hole) envelopes /disks / tori etc. It has been extensively tested and found reliable and accurate. The code has recently been supplemented with a Variable Eddington Tensor module which enables it to solve dust continuum radiative transfer problems from very low up to extremely high optical depths with only a few (about 7) iterations at most.

DISKSTRUCT is a simple 1+1-D code for modeling protoplanetary disks. It is not based on multidimensional radiative transfer! Instead, a flaring-angle recipe is used to compute the irradiation of the disk, while the disk vertical structure at each cylindrical radius is computed in a 1-D fashion; the models computed with this code are therefore approximate. Moreover, this model cannot deal with the dust inner rim.

In spite of these simplifications and drawbacks, the code can still be very useful for disk studies, for the following reasons:

• It allows the disk structure to be studied in a 1-D vertical fashion (one radial cylinder at a time). For understanding the structure of disks, and also for using it as a basis of other models, this can be a great advantage.
• For very optically thick disks this code is likely to be much faster than the RADMC full disk model.
• Viscous internal heating of the disk is implemented and converges quickly, whereas the RADMC code is still having difficulty to deal with high optical depth combined with viscously generated internal heat.

RADMC is a 2-D Monte-Carlo code for dust continuum radiative transfer circumstellar disks and envelopes. It is based on the method of Bjorkman & Wood (ApJ 2001, 554, 615), but with several modifications to produce smoother results with fewer photon packages.

SHELLSPEC calculates lightcurves, spectra and images of interacting binaries and extrasolar planets immersed in a moving circumstellar environment which is optically thin. It solves simple radiative transfer along the line of sight in moving media. The assumptions include LTE and optional known state quantities and velocity fields in 3D. Optional (non)transparent objects such as a spot, disc, stream, jet, shell or stars as well as an empty space may be defined (embedded) in 3D and their composite synthetic spectrum calculated. Roche model can be used as a boundary condition for the radiative tranfer. A related code based on SHELLSPEC, Pyshellspec (ascl:2106.006), solves the inverse problem of finding the stellar and orbital parameters.

STECKMAP stands for STEllar Content and Kinematics via Maximum A Posteriori likelihood. It is a tool for interpreting galaxy spectra in terms of their stellar populations through the derivation of their star formation history, age-metallicity relation, kinematics and extinction. The observed spectrum is projected onto a temporal sequence of models of single stellar populations, so as to determine a linear combination of these models that best fits the observed spectrum. The weights of the various components of this linear combination indicate the stellar content of the population. This procedure is regularized using various penalizing functions. The principles of the method are detailed in Ocvirk et al. 2006.

The basic mechanisms responsible for producing winds from cool, late-type stars are still largely unknown. We take inspiration from recent progress in understanding solar wind acceleration to develop a physically motivated model of the time-steady mass loss rates of cool main-sequence stars and evolved giants. This model follows the energy flux of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence from a subsurface convection zone to its eventual dissipation and escape through open magnetic flux tubes. We show how Alfven waves and turbulence can produce winds in either a hot corona or a cool extended chromosphere, and we specify the conditions that determine whether or not coronal heating occurs. These models do not utilize arbitrary normalization factors, but instead predict the mass loss rate directly from a star's fundamental properties. We take account of stellar magnetic activity by extending standard age-activity-rotation indicators to include the evolution of the filling factor of strong photospheric magnetic fields. We compared the predicted mass loss rates with observed values for 47 stars and found significantly better agreement than was obtained from the popular scaling laws of Reimers, Schroeder, and Cuntz. The algorithm used to compute cool-star mass loss rates is provided as a self-contained and efficient IDL computer code. We anticipate that the results from this kind of model can be incorporated straightforwardly into stellar evolution calculations and population synthesis techniques.

We present an algorithm to identify the type of an SN spectrum and to determine its redshift and age. This algorithm, based on the correlation techniques of Tonry & Davis, is implemented in the Supernova Identification (SNID) code. It is used by members of ongoing high-redshift SN searches to distinguish between type Ia and type Ib/c SNe, and to identify "peculiar" SNe Ia. We develop a diagnostic to quantify the quality of a correlation between the input and template spectra, which enables a formal evaluation of the associated redshift error. Furthermore, by comparing the correlation redshifts obtained using SNID with those determined from narrow lines in the SN host galaxy spectrum, we show that accurate redshifts (with a typical error less than 0.01) can be determined for SNe Ia without a spectrum of the host galaxy. Last, the age of an input spectrum is determined with a typical 3-day accuracy, shown here by using high-redshift SNe Ia with well-sampled light curves. The success of the correlation technique confirms the similarity of some SNe Ia at low and high redshifts. The SNID code, which is available to the community, can also be used for comparative studies of SN spectra, as well as comparisons between data and models.

GIBIS is a pixel-level simulator of the Gaia mission. It is intended to simulate how the Gaia instruments will observe the sky, using realistic simulations of the astronomical sources and of the instrumental properties. It is a branch of the global Gaia Simulator under development within the Gaia DPAC CU2 Group (Data Simulations). Access is currently restricted to Gaia DPAC teams.

With the increase of personal storage capacity, it is easy to find hundreds to thousands of FITS files in the personal computer of an astrophysicist. Because Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is a professional data format initiated by astronomers and used mainly in the small community, data management toolkits for FITS files are very few. Astronomers need a powerful tool to help them manage their local astronomical data. Although Virtual Observatory (VO) is a network oriented astronomical research environment, its applications and related technologies provide useful solutions to enhance the management and utilization of astronomical data hosted in an astronomer's personal computer. FITSManager is such a tool to provide astronomers an efficient management and utilization of their local data, bringing VO to astronomers in a seamless and transparent way. FITSManager provides fruitful functions for FITS file management, like thumbnail, preview, type dependent icons, header keyword indexing and search, collaborated working with other tools and online services, and so on. The development of the FITSManager is an effort to fill the gap between management and analysis of astronomical data.

This code combines the spectral sum-conserving methods of Weichselbaum and von Delft and of Peters, Pruschke and Anders (both relying upon the complete basis set construction of Anders and Schiller) with the use of non-Abelian symmetries in a flexible manner: Essentially any non-Abelian symmetry can be taught to the code, and any number of such symmetries can be used throughout the computation for any density of states, and to compute any local operators' correlation function's real and imaginary parts or any thermodynamical expectation value. The code works both at zero and finite temperatures.

Sherpa is the CIAO (ascl:1311.006) modeling and fitting application made available by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC). It can be used for analysis of images, spectra and time series from many telescopes, including optical telescopes such as Hubble. Sherpa is flexible, modular and extensible. It has an IPython user interface and it is also an importable Python module. Sherpa models, optimization and statistic functions are available via both C++ and Python for software developers wishing to link such functions directly to their own compiled code.

The CIAO 4.3 Sherpa release supports fitting of 1-D X-ray spectra from Chandra and other X-ray missions, as well as 1-D non-X-ray data, including ASCII data arrays, radial profiles, and lightcurves. The options for grating data analysis include fitting the spectrum with multiple response files required for overlapping orders in LETG observations. Modeling of 2-D spatial data is fully supported, including the PSF and exposure maps. User specified models can be added to Sherpa with advanced "user model" functionality.

The objective of this work is to report on the influence of muon interactions on the development of air showers initiated by astroparticles. We make a comparative study of the different theoretical approaches to muon bremsstrahlung and muonic pair production interactions. A detailed algorithm that includes all the relevant characteristics of such processes has been implemented in the AIRES air shower simulation system. We have simulated ultra high energy showers in different conditions in order to measure the influence of these muonic electromagnetic interactions. We have found that during the late stages of the shower development (well beyond the shower maximum) many global observables are significantly modified in relative terms when the mentioned interactions are taken into account. This is most evident in the case of the electromagnetic component of very inclined showers. On the other hand, our simulations indicate that the studied processes do not induce significant changes either in the position of the shower maximum or the structure of the shower front surface.

AMUSE is an open source software framework for large-scale simulations in astrophysics, in which existing codes for gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, hydrodynamics and radiative transport can be easily coupled and placed in the appropriate observational context.

We have developed a detailed stellar evolution code capable of following the simultaneous evolution of both stars in a binary system, together with their orbital properties. To demonstrate the capabilities of the code we investigate potential progenitors for the Type IIb supernova 1993J, which is believed to have been an interacting binary system prior to its primary exploding. We use our detailed binary stellar evolution code to model this system to determine the possible range of primary and secondary masses that could have produced the observed characteristics of this system, with particular reference to the secondary. Using the luminosities and temperatures for both stars (as determined by Maund et al. 2004) and the remaining mass of the hydrogen envelope of the primary at the time of explosion, we find that if mass transfer is 100 per cent efficient the observations can be reproduced by a system consisting of a 15 solar mass primary and a 14 solar mass secondary in an orbit with an initial period of 2100 days. With a mass transfer efficiency of 50 per cent, a more massive system consisting of a 17 solar mass primary and a 16 solar mass secondary in an initial orbit of 2360 days is needed. We also investigate some of the uncertainties in the evolution, including the effects of tidal interaction, convective overshooting and thermohaline mixing.

The freely available Monte Carlo code REAS for modelling radio emission from cosmic ray air showers has evolved to include the full complexity of air shower physics. REAS3 improves the calculation of the emission contributions, which was not fully consistent in earlier versions of REAS, by incorporating the missing radio emission due to the variation of the number of charged particles during the air shower evolution using an "end-point formalism". With the inclusion of these emission contributions, the structure of the simulated radio pulses changes from unipolar to bipolar, and the azimuthal emission pattern becomes nearly symmetric. Remaining asymmetries can be explained by radio emission due to the variation of the net charge excess in air showers, which is automatically taken into account in the new implementation. REAS3 constitutes the first self-consistent time-domain implementation based on single particle emission taking the full complexity of air shower physics into account, and is freely available for all interested users. REAS3 has been superseded by CoREAS (ascl:1406.003).

The CL-based package XDSPRES is a complete reducing facility for cross-dispersed spectra taken with the Ohio State Infrared Imager/Spectrometer, as installed at the SOAR telescope. This instrument provides spectra in the range between 1.2um and 2.35um in a single exposure, with resolving power of R ~ 1200. XDSPRES consists of two tasks, namely xdflat and doosiris. The former is a completely automated code for preparing normalized flat field images from raw flat field exposures. Doosiris provides a complete reduction pipeline that requires a minimum of user interaction. The user guide explains the general steps towards a fully reduced spectrum.

ARCHANGEL is a Unix-based package for the surface photometry of galaxies. While oriented for large angular size systems (i.e. many pixels), its tools can be applied to any imaging data of any size. The package core contains routines to perform the following critical galaxy photometry functions: sky determination; frame cleaning; ellipse fitting; profile fitting; and total and isophotal magnitudes.

The goal of the package is to provide an automated, assembly-line type of reduction system for galaxy photometry of space-based or ground-based imaging data. The procedures outlined in the documentation are flux independent, thus, these routines can be used for non-optical data as well as typical imaging datasets.

ARCHANGEL has been tested on several current OS's (RedHat Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X). A tarball for installation is available at the download page. The main routines are Python and FORTRAN based, therefore, a current installation of Python and a FORTRAN compiler are required. The ARCHANGEL package also contains Python hooks to the PGPLOT package, an XML processor and network tools which automatically link to data archives (i.e. NED, HST, 2MASS, etc) to download images in a non-interactive manner.

LIME solves the molecular and atomic excitation and radiation transfer problem in a molecular gas and predicting emergent spectra. The code works in arbitrary three dimensional geometry using unstructured Delaunay latices for the transport of photons. Various physical models can be used as input, ranging from analytical descriptions over tabulated models to SPH simulations. To generate the Delaunay grid we sample the input model randomly, but weigh the sample probability with the molecular density and other parameters, and thereby we obtain an average grid point separation that scales with the local opacity. Slow convergence of opaque models becomes traceable; when convergence between the level populations, the radiation field, and the point separation has been obtained, the grid is ray-traced to produced images that can readily be compared to observations. LIME is particularly well suited for modeling of ALMA data because of the high dynamic range in scales that can be resolved using this type of grid, and can furthermore deal with overlapping lines of multiple molecular and atomic species.

CASA, the Common Astronomy Software Applications package, is being developed with the primary goal of supporting the data post-processing needs of the next generation of radio astronomical telescopes such as ALMA and EVLA. The package can process both interferometric and single dish data. The CASA infrastructure consists of a set of C++ tools bundled together under an iPython interface as a set of data reduction tasks. This structure provides flexibility to process the data via task interface or as a python script. In addition to the data reduction tasks, many post-processing tools are available for even more flexibility and special purpose reduction needs.

We describe an automatic, objective routine for analyzing the clumpy structure in a spectral line position-position-velocity data cube. The algorithm works by first contouring the data at a multiple of the rms noise of the observations, then searches for peaks of emission which locate the clumps, and then follows them down to lower intensities. No a proiri clump profile is assumed. By creating simulated data, we test the performance of the algorithm and show that a contour map most accurately depicts internal structure at a contouring interval equal to twice the rms noise of the map. Blending of clump emission leads to small errors in mass and size determinations and in severe cases can result in a number of clumps being misidentified as a single unit, flattening the measured clump mass spectrum. The algorithm is applied to two real data sets as an example of its use. The Rosette molecular cloud is a 'typical' star-forming cloud, but in the Maddalena molecular cloud high-mass star formation is completely absent. Comparison of the two clump lists generated by the algorithm show that on a one-to-one basis the clumps in the star-forming cloud have higher peak temperatures, higher average densities, and are more gravitationally bound than in the non-star-forming cloud. Collective properties of the clumps, such as temperature-size-line-width-mass relations appear very similar, however. Contrary to the initial results reported in a previous paper (Williams & Blitz 1993), we find that the current, more thoroughly tested analysis finds no significant difference in the clump mass spectrum of the two clouds.

The tool McLuster is an open source code that can be used to either set up initial conditions for N-body computations or, alternatively, to generate artificial star clusters for direct investigation. There are two different versions of the code, one basic version for generating all kinds of unevolved clusters (in the following called mcluster) and one for setting up evolved stellar populations at a given age. The former is completely contained in the C file main.c. The latter (dubbed mcluster_sse) is more complex and requires additional FORTRAN routines, namely the Single-Star Evolution (SSE) routines by Hurley, Pols & Tout (ascl:1303.015) that are provided with the McLuster code.

SIGPROC is a package designed to standardize the initial analysis of the many types of fast-sampled pulsar data. Currently recognized machines are the Wide Band Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP), the Penn State Pulsar Machine (PSPM), the Arecibo Observatory Fourier Transform Machine (AOFTM), the Berkeley Pulsar Processors (BPP), the Parkes/Jodrell 1-bit filterbanks (SCAMP) and the filterbank at the Ooty radio telescope (OOTY). The SIGPROC tools should help users look at their data quickly, without the need to write (yet) another routine to read data or worry about big/little endian compatibility (byte swapping is handled automatically).

PRESTO is a large suite of pulsar search and analysis software. It was primarily designed to efficiently search for binary millisecond pulsars from long observations of globular clusters (although it has since been used in several surveys with short integrations and to process a lot of X-ray data as well). To date, PRESTO has discovered well over a hundred and fifty pulsars, including approximately 100 recycled pulsars, about 80 of which are in binaries. It is written primarily in ANSI C, with many of the recent routines in Python.

Written with portability, ease-of-use, and memory efficiency in mind, it can currently handle raw data from the following pulsar machines or formats:

- PSRFITS search-format data (as from GUPPI at the GBT and the Mock Spectrometers at Arecibo)
- SPIGOT at the GBT
- Most Wideband Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP) at Arecibo
- The Parkes and Jodrell Bank 1-bit filterbank formats
- Berkeley-Caltech Pulsar Machine (BCPM) at the GBT (may it RIP...)
- 8-bit filterbank format from SIGPROC (other formats will be added if required)
- A time series composed of single precision (i.e. 4-byte) floating point data
- Photon arrival times (or events) in ASCII or double-precision binary formats

HEALPix is an acronym for Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization of a sphere. As suggested in the name, this pixelization produces a subdivision of a spherical surface in which each pixel covers the same surface area as every other pixel. Another property of the HEALPix grid is that the pixel centers occur on a discrete number of rings of constant latitude, the number of constant-latitude rings is dependent on the resolution of the HEALPix grid.

PSRPOP is a package developed to model the Galactic population and evolution of radio pulsars. It is a collection of modules written in Fortran77 for an analysis of a large sample of pulsars detected by the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey. The main programs are: 1.) populate, which creates a model Galaxy of pulsars distributed according according to various assumptions; 2.) survey, which searches the model galaxies generated using populate using realistic models of pulsar surveys; and 3.) visualize, a Tk/PGPLOT script to plot various aspects of model detected pulsars from survey. A sample screenshot from visualize can be found here.

AlterBBN evaluates the abundances of the elements generated by Big-Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). This program computes the abundances of the elements in the standard model of cosmology and allows the user to alter the assumptions of the cosmological model to study their consequences on the abundances of the elements. In particular the baryon-to-photon ratio and the effective number of neutrinos, as well as the expansion rate and the entropy content of the Universe during BBN can be modified in AlterBBN. Such features allow the user to test the cosmological models by confronting them to BBN constraints.

PHOEBE (PHysics Of Eclipsing BinariEs) is a modeling package for eclipsing binary stars, built on top of the widely used WD program (Wilson & Devinney 1971). This introductory paper overviews most important scientific extensions (incorporating observational spectra of eclipsing binaries into the solution-seeking process, extracting individual temperatures from observed color indices, main-sequence constraining and proper treatment of the reddening), numerical innovations (suggested improvements to WD's Differential Corrections method, the new Nelder & Mead's downhill Simplex method) and technical aspects (back-end scripter structure, graphical user interface). While PHOEBE retains 100% WD compatibility, its add-ons are a powerful way to enhance WD by encompassing even more physics and solution reliability.

PLplot is a cross-platform software package for creating scientific plots. To help accomplish that task it is organized as a core C library, language bindings for that library, and device drivers which control how the plots are presented in non-interactive and interactive plotting contexts. The PLplot core library can be used to create standard x-y plots, semi-log plots, log-log plots, contour plots, 3D surface plots, mesh plots, bar charts and pie charts. Multiple graphs (of the same or different sizes) may be placed on a single page, and multiple pages are allowed for those device formats that support them. PLplot has core support for Unicode. This means for our many Unicode-aware devices that plots can be labelled using the enormous selection of Unicode mathematical symbols. A large subset of our Unicode-aware devices also support complex text layout (CTL) languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic and Indic-derived CTL scripts such as Devanagari, Thai, Lao, and Tibetan. PLplot device drivers support a number of different file formats for non-interactive plotting and a number of different platforms that are suitable for interactive plotting. It is easy to add new device drivers to PLplot by writing a small number of device dependent routines.

E3D is a package of tools for the analysis and visualization of IFS data. It is capable of reading, writing, and visualizing reduced data from 3D spectrographs of any kind.

R3D was developed to reduce fiber-based integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data. The package comprises a set of command-line routines adapted for each of these steps, suitable for creating pipelines. The routines have been tested against simulations, and against real data from various integral field spectrographs (PMAS, PPAK, GMOS, VIMOS and INTEGRAL). Particular attention is paid to the treatment of cross-talk.

R3D unifies the reduction techniques for the different IFS instruments to a single one, in order to allow the general public to reduce different instruments data in an homogeneus, consistent and simple way. Although still in its prototyping phase, it has been proved to be useful to reduce PMAS (both in the Larr and the PPAK modes), VIMOS and INTEGRAL data. The current version has been coded in Perl, using PDL, in order to speed-up the algorithm testing phase. Most of the time critical algorithms have been translated to C, and it is our intention to translate all of them. However, even in this phase R3D is fast enough to produce valuable science frames in reasonable time.

We describe an automated method for assigning the most probable physical parameters to the components of an eclipsing binary, using only its photometric light curve and combined colors. With traditional methods, one attempts to optimize a multi-parameter model over many iterations, so as to minimize the chi-squared value. We suggest an alternative method, where one selects pairs of coeval stars from a set of theoretical stellar models, and compares their simulated light curves and combined colors with the observations. This approach greatly reduces the parameter space over which one needs to search, and allows one to estimate the components' masses, radii and absolute magnitudes, without spectroscopic data. We have implemented this method in an automated program using published theoretical isochrones and limb-darkening coefficients. Since it is easy to automate, this method lends itself to systematic analyses of datasets consisting of photometric time series of large numbers of stars, such as those produced by OGLE, MACHO, TrES, HAT, and many others surveys.