Webspec for Chandra Cycle 10

Updated Webspec with the Chandra cycle 10 responses.

Suzaku XIS response generator

Checked in xsl_suzaku_xis_makeresp, an automated script to build the XIS rmf and arf by calling xisrmfgen and xissimarfgen. Three speed options (fast, medium, slow) use different channel and energy binning schemes as well as different accuracies in the xissimarfgen run. The accuracies probably need a little more tweaking.

The point source option assumes that the source is in the center of the WMAP. Other possibilities here are to use ftstat on the WMAP to get the pixel with the highest value or the centroid of the map. It's not clear which is the best thing to do.

I would like to be able to use the algorithm found by Randall and implemented in xissmooth. This requires turning xissmooth into a general purpose ftool.

first xspec v12.4 patches

A couple of minor patches are now up

12.4.0a

This fixes some cases where invalid input leads to segmentation faults: The model command crashes for certain forms of invalid model syntax. The tclout command crashes for some of its options when the invalid spectrum number 0 is specified while there are data sets loaded. Our thanks to Jeremy Sanders for pointing this out. Report added on Dec 10, 2007. This patch modifies headas/Xspec/src/XSUser/Handler/HandlerUtils.cxx, XSUtil/Parse/Expression.cxx, and XSPlot/Plot/Plot.cxx

12.4.0b

For the model command, entering the abbreviated name bkn should select the bknpower component and not the bkn2pow component. Our thanks to Davide Donato for pointing this out. Report added on Dec 18, 2007. This patch modifies headas/Xspec/src/manager/model.dat

MJDREF precision and time filter file in extractor

Craig Markwardt spotted that when extractor writes out MJDREF it is only in single precision while it can be read in at double precision. Modified this to preserve precision as v4.80.

Craig also noted that the time filter file can be specified as just the filename or the filename with a numerical HDU specifier but not with a named HDU eg filename[STDGTI]). This is now fixed in v4.81.

XSPEC wiki and some notes for Suzaku

I've added notes for the Suzaku meeting in San Diego to the new XSPEC wiki.

xspec v12.4 released

v12.4 is now available as part of HEAsoft 6.4.