self-irradiated funnel

Pavel Abolmasov sent in his self-irradiated funnel model (Abolmasov et al. 2009) and I added an entry to the new models web page.

addascaspec

The perl script addascapec, which is actually useful for other missions in addition to ASCA, had a couple of problems which I've fixed. The default errmeth should have been POISS-0 instead of POISS-1 and this parameter was not being used when summing background spectra.

Lexicon of handy statistical methods

Andrew Gelman's statistical lexicon.

bug in thermal broadening

Irina Zhuravleva at MPE pointed out that the thermal broadening option in the xspec apec model gives a sigma which is a factor of sqrt(2) too large. Fortunately, I don't think has any science implications since there have been no observations capable of measuring this broadening.

update on 6/8/09: Richard Sturm points out there is the same error in the NEI code.

panda/epanda/bpanda regions

I've added support to cfitsio region filtering for the panda/epanda/bpanda regions produced by ds9. Note that this assumes only one azimuthal region and one annulus although the region specification itself allows multiple for both. Made corresponding changes in extractor though note that the FITS region extension written in this case is not covered by the standard which does not include these shapes.

Spectral file format standard document

I updated the PHA file standard document to try to make it clearer. I fixed an error in the type II example which had HDUCLAS3 and HDUCLAS4 inverted.