photos from COSPAR workshop in Alexandria

A selection of my photos from the COSPAR Capacity Building Workshop on X-ray Astronomy held at the New Library of Alexandria are now up on Flickr.

A couple of fakeit notes

Kip has pointed out that fakeit doesn't handle multiple sources correctly. If you set up with two sources with their own responses modelling a dataset then do a fakeit only the first source and response contribute to the simulated spectrum. This will take a bit of work to fix.

Jennifer Donley at Arizona e-mailed to worry about the warning message about incompatible CHANTYPE after simulating Chandra ACIS spectra for CY10. This is a minor bug in xspec which fails to pick up the CHANTYPE value from the response matrix when doing a "fakeit none".

xspec bug fixes 12.4.0d - k

While I was away on my travels, Craig put up xspec bug fixes 12.4.0d - k.

seg fault in rgsrmfsmooth and NUMGRP in rbnrmf

Fabio Pizzolato reported a seg fault using rgsrmfsmooth in the case when the spectrum had been binned up by a factor of 4. The fix was to increase the space allocated for response groups in the output response.

In the course of diagnosing this I realized that rbnrmf was not setting the NUMGRP keyword in output response matrices correctly - it was the number of response groups from the input file that was being written. This shouldn't have made any practical difference but was confusing.

xspec11 mdefine seg fault

Chris Mountford at Leicester reports and provides the fix for a v11 seg fault in mdefine when running on an x86_64 using gfortran.

extractor and filenames containing '+'

Alex Padgett points out that extractor doesn't handle filenames containing a '+' because it assumes that everything following the '+' is an extension number. Fixed this by checking whether the '+' comes before a '.' (v4.82).