modification to lrt.tcl

The likelihood-ratio test script doesn't work when there are multiple datagroups. The reason is that switching between models by making them active/inactive loses information on the parameters for groups > 1 when the model becomes inactive. We perhaps should modify the model inactive command to track multiple datagroups however as a workaround I modified lrt.tcl to use command files to store the model definitions. Each time the model is switched the appropriate command file is read.

started work on extractor v5

Started work on the new version of extractor which will use cfitsio internal filtering as much as possible.

In the course of switching the region filtering to cfitsio I found an obscure bug. If the image and wmap coordinates are the same but have different binning and wtmapfix is set then the WMAP bins with -1 are not quite correct. Several bins at the edge of the selected region can have counts in them when the value should be -1.

xselect and ROSAT

Dave Pooley reports that xselect has problems under Mac OS 10.4 but not 10.3 when using ROSAT data. I confirmed the error under 10.4. The error message is something like

Could not find keyword for Instrument for ROSAT
NONE
Got new mission: ?4????AF?'?AF?AF?AF??
'7????P???? R??????D???51

I don't know why this occurs but the fix is to edit xselect.mdb to use the new wildcard facility to deal with the PSPCB and PSPCC instrument variant names instead of using the instkey specification to only read the first four characters of the INSTRUME keyword.

xspec patches

A few new patches have been added recently. 12.4.0x fixes a number of problems that showed up when using the new g++-4.3.0 compiler and when using gcc on Solaris platforms. This patch level is released as part of HEAsoft 6.4.1. 12.4.0y improves the handling of cases when the L-M algorithm pegs a parameter due to a zero or negative pivot value in the Hessian. 12.4.0z keeps the fit valid when the fit method is changed. This allows the improve command to be run after an L-M fit. 12.4.0aa is a fix to allow filenames prompted for by the fakeit command to being with a / ie to be absolute paths. Patches available from the usual place.

xselect: Chandra response generation

Overhauled the response generation option on "save spec" for Chandra ACIS data. I added an extended? parameter to specify whether the source is a point source or not. For a point source the arf is created using mkarf, and for an extended source mkwarf is used. The rmf is generated using mkrmf or mkacisrmf depending on whether CTI correction has been performed. The script checks keywords in the spectrum to determine which is appropriate. Note that to find some of the auxiliary files required xselect should be being run in either main directory for the dataset or in a directory one level down (eg secondary).

Note that I also modified the FITS region extension written by extractor so that the EXTNAME is REGION and EXTVER is used to track multiple extensions. This is a change from an EXTNAME of REG001## and is made to conform with the CXC standard defined by McDowell & Rots. There may be an issue here is XMM-Newton SAS routines are expecting the REG001## names.

Science 2.0

SciAm has a brief survey of Web 2.0 applications in science. In particular, it argues that putting scientists working notes on-line will foster greater communication and collaboration.

reading old RMFs

Tahir points out that the BeppoSAX RMFs don't work in rbnrmf. The problem is that these files have only RMFVERSN='1992a' and do not have the HDUVERS keyword that the software now requires. The workaround is to add HDUVERS='1.0.0' to the MATRIX extension. I've updated the relevant subroutines to check for RMFVERSN if HDUVERS is not found.