JAGS analyzes Bayesian hierarchical models using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) simulation not wholly unlike BUGS. JAGS has three aims:
The Large Survey Database (LSD) is a Python framework and DBMS for distributed storage, cross-matching and querying of large survey catalogs (>10^9 rows, >1 TB). The primary driver behind its development is the analysis of Pan-STARRS PS1 data. It is specifically optimized for fast queries and parallel sweeps of positionally and temporally indexed datasets. It transparently scales to more than >10^2 nodes, and can be made to function in "shared nothing" architectures.
CHORIZOS is a multi-purpose Bayesian code developed in IDL to compare photometric data with model spectral energy distributions (SEDs). The user can select the SED family (e.g. Kurucz) and choose the behavior of each parameter (e.g. Teff) to be fixed, constrained to a given range, or unconstrained. The code calculates the likelihood for the full specified parameter ranges, thus allowing for the identification of multiple solutions and the evaluation of the full correlation matrix for the derived parameters of a single solution.
HARM uses a conservative, shock-capturing scheme for evolving the equations of general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics. The fluxes are calculated using the Harten, Lax, & van Leer scheme. A variant of constrained transport, proposed earlier by Tóth, is used to maintain a divergence-free magnetic field. Only the covariant form of the metric in a coordinate basis is required to specify the geometry. On smooth flows HARM converges at second order.
Photometric rotational modulations due to starspots remain the most common and accessible way to study stellar activity. Modelling rotational modulations allows one to invert the observations into several basic parameters, such as the rotation period, spot coverage, stellar inclination and differential rotation rate. The most widely used analytic model for this inversion comes from Budding (1977) and Dorren (1987), who considered circular, grey starspots for a linearly limb darkened star. That model is extended to be more suitable in the analysis of high precision photometry such as that by Kepler. Macula, a Fortran 90 code, provides several improvements, such as non-linear limb darkening of the star and spot, a single-domain analytic function, partial derivatives for all input parameters, temporal partial derivatives, diluted light compensation, instrumental offset normalisations, differential rotation, starspot evolution and predictions of transit depth variations due to unocculted spots. The inclusion of non-linear limb darkening means macula has a maximum photometric error an order-of-magnitude less than that of Dorren (1987) for Sun-like stars observed in the Kepler-bandpass. The code executes three orders-of-magnitude faster than comparable numerical codes making it well-suited for inference problems.
TMCalc is a C code developed as an extension to ARES. Using the line list given, the code can be used as a precise and fast indicator of the spectroscopic temperature and metallicity for dwarf FKG stars with effective temperatures ranging from 4500 K to 6500 K and with [Fe/H] ranging from -0.8 dex to 0.4 dex.
Phantom-GRAPE is a numerical software library to accelerate collisionless $N$-body simulation with SIMD instruction set on x86 architecture. The Newton's forces and also central forces with an arbitrary shape f(r), which have a finite cutoff radius r_cut (i.e. f(r)=0 at r>r_cut), can be quickly computed.
ANNz is a freely available software package for photometric redshift estimation using Artificial Neural Networks. ANNz learns the relation between photometry and redshift from an appropriate training set of galaxies for which the redshift is already known. Where a large and representative training set is available, ANNz is a highly competitive tool when compared with traditional template-fitting methods.
For a newer implementation of this package, please see ANNz2 (ascl:1910.014).
MeqTrees is a software package for implementing Measurement Equations. This makes it uniquely suited for simulation and calibration of radioastronomical data, especially that involving new radiotelescopes and observational regimes. MeqTrees is implemented as a Python-based front-end called the meqbrowser, and an efficient (C++-based) computational back-end called the meqserver. Numerical models are defined on the front-end via a Python-based Tree Definition Language (TDL), then rapidly executed on the back-end. The use of TDL facilitates an extremely short turn-around time for experimentation with new ideas. This is also helped by unprecedented visualization capabilities for all final and intermediate results. A flexible data model and a number of important optimizations in the back-end ensures that the numerical performance is comparable to that of hand-written code.
MeqTrees includes a highly capable FITS viewer and sky model manager called Tigger, which can also work as a standalone tool.
DiskFit implements procedures for fitting non-axisymmetries in either kinematic or photometric data. DiskFit can analyze H-alpha and CO velocity field data as well as HI kinematics to search for non-circular motions in the disk galaxies. DiskFit can also be used to constrain photometric models of the disc, bar and bulge. It deprecates an earlier version, by a subset of these authors, called velfit.
Scanamorphos is an IDL program to build maps from scan observations made with bolometer arrays. Scanamorphos can post-process scan observations performed with the Herschel photometer arrays. This post-processing mainly consists in subtracting the total low-frequency noise (both its thermal and non-thermal components), masking cosmic ray hit residuals, and projecting the data onto a map. Although it was developed for Herschel, it is also applicable with minimal adjustment to scan observations made with other bolometer arrays provided they entail sufficient redundancy; it was successfully applied to P-Artemis, an instrument operating on the APEX telescope. Scanamorphos does not assume any particular noise model and does not apply any Fourier-space filtering to the data. It is an empirical tool using only the redundancy built in the observations, taking advantage of the fact that each portion of the sky is sampled at multiple times by multiple bolometers. The user is allowed to optionally visualize and control results at each intermediate step, but the processing is fully automated.
IRACproc is a software suite that facilitates the co-addition of dithered or mapped Spitzer/IRAC data to make them ready for further analysis with application to a wide variety of IRAC observing programs. The software runs within PDL, a numeric extension for Perl available from pdl.perl.org, and as stand alone perl scripts. In acting as a wrapper for the Spitzer Science Center's MOPEX software, IRACproc improves the rejection of cosmic rays and other transients in the co-added data. In addition, IRACproc performs (optional) Point Spread Function (PSF) fitting, subtraction, and masking of saturated stars.
FAMIAS (Frequency Analysis and Mode Identification for Asteroseismology) is a package of software tools programmed in C++ for the analysis of photometric and spectroscopic time-series data. FAMIAS provides analysis tools that are required for the steps between the data reduction and the seismic modeling. Two main sets of tools are incorporated in FAMIAS. The first set permits to search for periodicities in the data using Fourier and non-linear least-squares fitting techniques. The other set permits to carry out a mode identification for the detected pulsation frequencies to determine their harmonic degree l, and azimuthal order m. FAMIAS is applicable to main-sequence pulsators hotter than the Sun. This includes Gamma Dor, Delta Sct stars, slowly pulsating B (SPB)-stars and Beta Cep stars - basically all stars for which empirical mode identification is required to successfully carry out asteroseismology.
Given two catalogs K and K' of n and n' astrophysical sources, respectively, Aspects (Association positionnelle/probabiliste de catalogues de sources) computes, for any objects Mi ∈ K and M'j ∈ K', the probability that M'j is a counterpart of Mi, i.e. that they are the same source. To determine this probability of association, the code takes into account the coordinates and the positional uncertainties of all the objects. Aspects also computes the probability P(Ai, 0 | C ∩ C') that Mi has no counterpart.
Aspects is written in Fortran 95; the required Fortran 90 Numerical Recipes routines used in version 1.0 have been replaced with free equivalents in version 2.0.
The two-point correlation function is a simple statistic that quantifies the clustering of a given distribution of objects. In studies of the large scale structure of the Universe, it is an important tool containing information about the matter clustering and the evolution of the Universe at different cosmological epochs. A classical application of this statistic is the galaxy-galaxy correlation function to find constraints on the parameter Omega_m or the location of the baryonic acoustic oscillation peak. This calculation, however, is very expensive in terms of computer power and Graphics Processing Units provide one solution for efficient analysis of the increasingly larger galaxy surveys that are currently taking place.
GP2PCF is a public code in CUDA for performing this computation; with a single GPU board it is possible to achieve 120-fold speedups with respect to a standard implementation in C running on a single CPU. With respect to other solutions such as k-trees the improvement is of a factor of a few retaining full precision. The speedup is comparable to running in parallel in a cluster of O(100) cores.
pPXF extracts the stellar kinematics or stellar population from absorption-line spectra of galaxies using the Penalized Pixel-Fitting method (pPXF) developed by Cappellari & Emsellem (2004, PASP, 116, 138). Additional features implemented in the pPXF routine include:
The code is available in IDL and in Python versions.
GOSSIP fits the electro-magnetic emission of an object (the SED, Spectral Energy Distribution) against synthetic models to find the simulated one that best reproduces the observed data. It builds-up the observed SED of an object (or a large sample of objects) combining magnitudes in different bands and eventually a spectrum; then it performs a chi-square minimization fitting procedure versus a set of synthetic models. The fitting results are used to estimate a number of physical parameters like the Star Formation History, absolute magnitudes, stellar mass and their Probability Distribution Functions.
EZ (Easy-Z) estimates redshifts for extragalactic objects. It compares the observed spectrum with a set of (user given) spectral templates to find out the best value for the redshift. To accomplish this task, it uses a highly configurable set of algorithms. EZ is easily extendible with new algorithms. It is implemented as a set of C programs and a number of python classes. It can be used as a standalone program, or the python classes can be directly imported by other applications.
SGNAPS allows the user to plot a one-dimensional spectrum, together with the corresponding two-dimensional and a reference spectrum (for example the sky spectrum). This makes it possible to check on the reality of spectral features that are present in the one-dimensional spectrum, which could be due to bad sky subtraction or fringing residuals. It is also possible to zoom in and out all three spectra, edit the one-dimensional spectrum, smooth it with a simple square window function, measure the signal to noise over a selected wavelength interval, and fit the position of a selected spectral line. SGNAPS also allows the astronomer to obtain quick redshift estimates by providing a tool to fit or mark the position of a spectral line, and a function that will compute a list of possible redshifts based on a list of known lines in galaxy spectra. SGNAPS is derived from the plotting tools of VIPGI and contains almost all of their capabilities.
NOTE: SGNAPS functionality has been transitioned to EZ.
TA-DA is a pre-compiled IDL widget-based application which greatly simplifies and improves the analysis of stellar photometric data in comparison with theoretical models and allows the derivation of stellar parameters from multi-band photometry. It is flexible and can address a number of problems, from the interpolation of stellar models or sets of stellar physical parameters in general to the computation of synthetic photometry in arbitrary filters or units. It also analyzes observed color-magnitude diagrams and allows a Bayesian derivation of stellar parameters (and extinction) based on multi-band data.
FLUKA (FLUktuierende KAskade) is a general-purpose tool for calculations of particle transport and interactions with matter. FLUKA can simulate with high accuracy the interaction and propagation in matter of about 60 different particles, including photons and electrons from 1 keV to thousands of TeV, neutrinos, muons of any energy, hadrons of energies up to 20 TeV (up to 10 PeV by linking FLUKA with the DPMJET code) and all the corresponding antiparticles, neutrons down to thermal energies and heavy ions. The program, written in Fortran, can also transport polarised photons (e.g., synchrotron radiation) and optical photons. Time evolution and tracking of emitted radiation from unstable residual nuclei can be performed online.
Rockstar (Robust Overdensity Calculation using K-Space Topologically Adaptive Refinement) identifies dark matter halos, substructure, and tidal features. The approach is based on adaptive hierarchical refinement of friends-of-friends groups in six phase-space dimensions and one time dimension, which allows for robust (grid-independent, shape-independent, and noise-resilient) tracking of substructure. Our method is massively parallel (up to 10^5 CPUs) and runs on the largest current simulations (>10^10 particles) with high efficiency (10 CPU hours and 60 gigabytes of memory required per billion particles analyzed). Rockstar offers significant improvement in substructure recovery as compared to several other halo finders.
PAHFIT is an IDL tool for decomposing Spitzer IRS spectra of PAH emission sources, with a special emphasis on the careful recovery of ambiguous silicate absorption, and weak, blended dust emission features. PAHFIT is primarily designed for use with full 5-35 micron Spitzer low-resolution IRS spectra. PAHFIT is a flexible tool for fitting spectra, and you can add or disable features, compute combined flux bands, change fitting limits, etc., without changing the code.
PAHFIT uses a simple, physically-motivated model, consisting of starlight, thermal dust continuum in a small number of fixed temperature bins, resolved dust features and feature blends, prominent emission lines (which themselves can be blended with dust features), as well as simple fully-mixed or screen dust extinction, dominated by the silicate absorption bands at 9.7 and 18 microns. Most model components are held fixed or are tightly constrained. PAHFIT uses Drude profiles to recover the full strength of dust emission features and blends, including the significant power in the wings of the broad emission profiles. This means the resulting feature strengths are larger (by factors of 2-4) than are recovered by methods which estimate the underlying continuum using line segments or spline curves fit through fiducial wavelength anchors.
CALCLENS, written in C and employing widely available software libraries, efficiently computes weak gravitational lensing shear signals from large N-body light cone simulations over a curved sky. The algorithm properly accounts for the sky curvature and boundary conditions, is able to produce redshift-dependent shear signals including corrections to the Born approximation by using multiple-plane ray tracing, and properly computes the lensed images of source galaxies in the light cone. The key feature of this algorithm is a new, computationally efficient Poisson solver for the sphere that combines spherical harmonic transform and multgrid methods. As a result, large areas of sky (~10,000 square degrees) can be ray traced efficiently at high-resolution using only a few hundred cores on widely available machines. Coupled with realistic galaxy populations placed in large N-body light cone simulations, CALCLENS is ideally suited for the construction of synthetic weak lensing shear catalogs to be used to test for systematic effects in data analysis procedures for upcoming large-area sky surveys.
Consistent Trees generates merger trees and halo catalogs which explicitly ensure consistency of halo properties (mass, position, velocity, radius) across timesteps. It has demonstrated the ability to improve both the completeness (through detecting and inserting otherwise missing halos) and purity (through detecting and removing spurious objects) of both merger trees and halo catalogs. Consistent Trees is able to robustly measure the self-consistency of halo finders and to directly measure the uncertainties in halo positions, halo velocities, and the halo mass function for a given halo finder based on consistency between snapshots in cosmological simulations.
SearchCal builds an evolutive catalog of stars suitable as calibrators within any given user-defined angular distance and magnitude around a scientific target. SearchCal can select suitable bright calibration stars (V ≤ 10; K ≤ 5.0) for obtaining the ultimate precision of current interferometric instruments like the VLTI and faint calibration stars up to K ~ 15 around the scientific target. Star catalogs available at the CDS are searched via web requests and provide the useful astrometric and photometric informations for selecting calibrators. The missing photometries are computed with an accuracy of about 0.1 mag. The stellar angular diameter is estimated with a precision of about 10% through newly determined surface-brightness versus color-index relations based on the I, J, H and K magnitudes. For each star the squared visibility is computed taking into account the central wavelength and the maximum baseline of the predicted observations.
ConvPhot measures colors between two images having different resolutions. ConvPhot is designed to work especially for faint galaxies, accurately measuring colors in relatively crowded fields. It makes full use of the spatial and morphological information contained in the highest quality images to analyze multiwavelength data with inhomogeneous image quality.
Written in 2007, ConvPhot has been superseded by T-PHOT (ascl:1609.001)
TRIP is an interactive computer algebra system that is devoted to perturbation series computations, and specially adapted to celestial mechanics. Its development started in 1988, as an upgrade of the special purpose FORTRAN routines elaborated by J. Laskar for the demonstration of the chaotic behavior of the Solar System. TRIP is a mature and efficient tool for handling multivariate generalized power series, and embeds two kernels, a symbolic and a numerical kernel. This numerical kernel communicates with Gnuplot or Grace to plot the graphics and allows one to plot the numerical evaluation of symbolic objects.
Tempo2 is a pulsar timing package developed to be used both for general pulsar timing applications and also for pulsar timing array research in which data-sets from multiple pulsars need to be processed simultaneously. It was initially developed by George Hobbs and Russell Edwards as part of the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array project. Tempo2 is based on the original Tempo (ascl:1509.002) code and can be used (from the command-line) in a similar fashion. It is very versatile and can be extended by plugins.
Specview is a tool for 1-D spectral visualization and analysis of astronomical spectrograms. Written in Java, it is capable of reading all the Hubble Space Telescope spectral data formats as well as data from several other instruments (such as IUE, FUSE, ISO, FORS and SDSS), preview spectra from MAST, and data from generic FITS and ASCII tables. It can read data from Virtual Observatory servers, and read and write spectrogram data in Virtual Observatory SED format. It can also read files in the SPC Galactic format used in the chemistry field. Once ingested, data can be plotted and examined with a large selection of custom settings. Specview supports instrument-specific data quality handling, flexible spectral units conversions, custom plotting attributes, plot annotations, tiled plots, hardcopy to JPEG files and PostScript file or printer, etc. Specview can be used to build wide-band SEDs, overplotting or combining data from the same astronomical source taken with different instruments and/or spectral bands. Data can be further processed with averaging, splicing, detrending, and Fourier filtering tools. Specview has a spectral model fitting capability that enables the user to work with multi-component models (including user-defined models) and fit models to data.
The McGill Planar Hydrogen Atmosphere Code (McPHAC) v1.1 calculates the hydrostatic equilibrium structure and emergent spectrum of an unmagnetized hydrogen atmosphere in the plane-parallel approximation at surface gravities appropriate for neutron stars. McPHAC incorporates several improvements over previous codes for which tabulated model spectra are available: (1) Thomson scattering is treated anisotropically, which is shown to result in a 0.2%-3% correction in the emergent spectral flux across the 0.1-5 keV passband; (2) the McPHAC source code is made available to the community, allowing it to be scrutinized and modified by other researchers wishing to study or extend its capabilities; and (3) the numerical uncertainty resulting from the discrete and iterative solution is studied as a function of photon energy, indicating that McPHAC is capable of producing spectra with numerical uncertainties <0.01%. The accuracy of the spectra may at present be limited to ~1%, but McPHAC enables researchers to study the impact of uncertain inputs and additional physical effects, thereby supporting future efforts to reduce those inaccuracies. Comparison of McPHAC results with spectra from one of the previous model atmosphere codes (NSA) shows agreement to lsim1% near the peaks of the emergent spectra. However, in the Wien tail a significant deficit of flux in the spectra of the previous model is revealed, determined to be due to the previous work not considering large enough optical depths at the highest photon frequencies. The deficit is most significant for spectra with T eff < 105.6 K, though even there it may not be of much practical importance for most observations.
Systemic Console is a tool for advanced analysis of exoplanetary data. It comprises a graphical tool for fitting radial velocity and transits datasets and a library of routines for non-interactive calculations. Among its features are interactive plotting of RV curves and transits, combined fitting of RV and transit timing (primary and secondary), interactive periodograms and FAP estimation, and bootstrap and MCMC error estimation. The console package includes public radial velocity and transit data.
QFitsView is a FITS file viewer that can display one, two, and three-dimensional FITS files. It has three modes of operation, depending of what kind of data is being displayed. One-dimensional data are shown in an x-y plot. Two-dimensional images are shown in the main window. Three-dimensional data cubes can be displayed in a variety of ways, with the third dimension shown as a x-y plot at the bottom of the image display. QFitsView was written in C++ and uses the Qt widget library, which makes it available for all major platforms: Windows, MAC OS X, and many Unix variants.
GASGANO is a GUI software tool for managing and viewing data files produced by VLT Control System (VCS) and the Data Flow System (DFS). It is developed and maintained by ESO to help its user community manage and organize astronomical data observed and produced by all VLT compliant telescopes in a systematic way. The software understands FITS, PAF, and ASCII files, and Reduction Blocks, and can group, sort, classify, filter, and search data in addition to allowing the user to browse, view, and manage them.
SMART is an IDL-based software tool, developed by the IRS Instrument Team at Cornell University, that allows users to reduce and analyze Spitzer data from all four modules of the Infrared Spectrograph, including the peak-up arrays. The software is designed to make full use of the ancillary files generated in the Spitzer Science Center pipeline so that it can either remove or flag artifacts and corrupted data and maximize the signal-to-noise ratio in the extraction routines. It can be run in both interactive and batch modes. SMART includes visualization tools for assessing data quality, basic arithmetic operations for either two-dimensional images or one-dimensional spectra, extraction of both point and extended sources, and a suite of spectral analysis tools.
HAM solves non-relativistic hyperbolic partial differential equations in conservative form using high-resolution shock-capturing techniques. This version of HAM has been configured to solve the magnetohydrodynamic equations of motion in axisymmetry to evolve a shearing box model.
The efficiency of thin disk accretion onto black holes depends on the inner boundary condition, specifically the torque applied to the disk at the last stable orbit. This is usually assumed to vanish. This code estimates the torque on a magnetized disk using a steady magnetohydrodynamic inflow model originally developed by Takahashi et al. The efficiency e can depart significantly from the classical thin disk value. In some cases e > 1, i.e., energy is extracted from the black hole.
ORBADV adopts a ZEUS-like scheme to solve magnetohydrodynamic equations of motion in a shearing sheet. The magnetic field is discretized on a staggered mesh, and magnetic field variables represent fluxes through zone faces. The code uses obital advection to ensure fast and accurate integration in a large shearing box.
TwoDSSM solves the equations of self-gravitating hydrodynamics in the shearing sheet, with cooling. TwoDSSM is configured to use a simple, exponential cooling model, although it contains code for a more complicated (and perhaps more realistic) cooling model based on a one-zone vertical model. The complicated cooling model can be switched on using a flag.
Conservative numerical schemes for general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics (GRMHD) require a method for transforming between "conserved'' variables such as momentum and energy density and "primitive" variables such as rest-mass density, internal energy, and components of the four-velocity. The forward transformation (primitive to conserved) has a closed-form solution, but the inverse transformation (conserved to primitive) requires the solution of a set of five nonlinear equations. This code performs the inversion.
The detection of cosmic ray hits (cosmics) in fiber-fed integral-field spectroscopy (IFS) data of single exposures is a challenging task because of the complex signal recorded by IFS instruments. Existing detection algorithms are commonly found to be unreliable in the case of IFS data, and the optimal parameter settings are usually unknown a priori for a given dataset. The Calar Alto legacy integral field area (CALIFA) survey generates hundreds of IFS datasets for which a reliable and robust detection algorithm for cosmics is required as an important part of the fully automatic CALIFA data reduction pipeline. PyCosmic combines the edge-detection algorithm of L.A.Cosmic with a point-spread function convolution scheme. PyCosmic is the only algorithm that achieves an acceptable detection performance for CALIFA data. Only for strongly undersampled IFS data does L.A.Cosmic exceed the performance of PyCosmic by a few percent. Thus, PyCosmic appears to be the most versatile cosmics detection algorithm for IFS data.
QYMSYM is a GPU accelerated 2nd order hybrid symplectic integrator that identifies close approaches between particles and switches from symplectic to Hermite algorithms for particles that require higher resolution integrations. This is a parallel code running with CUDA on a video card that puts the many processors on board to work while taking advantage of fast shared memory.
Sapporo mimics the behavior of GRAPE hardware and uses the GPU to perform high-precision gravitational N-body simulations. It makes use of CUDA and therefore only works on NVIDIA GPUs. N-body codes currently running on GRAPE-6 can switch to Sapporo by a simple relinking of the library. Sapporo's precision is comparable to that of GRAPE-6, even though internally the GPU hardware is limited to single precision arithmetics. This limitation is effectively overcome by emulating double precision for calculating the distance between particles.
BOOTTRAN calculates error bars for Keplerian orbital parameters for both single- and multiple-planet systems. It takes the best-fit parameters and radial velocity data (BJD, velocity, errors) and calculates the error bars from sampling distribution estimated via bootstrapping. It is recommended to be used together with the RVLIN (ascl:1210.031) package, which find best-fit Keplerian orbital parameters. Both RVLIN and BOOTTRAN are compatible with multiple-telescope data. BOOTTRAN also calculates the transit time and secondary eclipse time and their associated error bars. The algorithm is described in the appendix of the associated article.
The RVLIN package for IDL is a set of routines that quickly fits an arbitrary number of Keplerian curves to radial velocity data. It can handle data from multiple telescopes (i.e. it solves for the offset), constraints on P, e, and time of peri passage, and can incorporate transit timing data. The code handles fixed periods and circular orbits in combination and transit time constraints, including for multiple transiting planets.
S2LET provides high performance routines for fast wavelet analysis of signals on the sphere. It uses the SSHT code (ascl:2207.034) built on the MW sampling theorem to perform exact spherical harmonic transforms on the sphere. The resulting wavelet transform implemented in S2LET is theoretically exact, i.e. a band-limited signal can be recovered from its wavelet coefficients exactly and the wavelet coefficients capture all the information. S2LET also supports the HEALPix sampling scheme, in which case the transforms are not theoretically exact but achieve good numerical accuracy. The core routines of S2LET are written in C and have interfaces in Matlab, IDL and Java. Real signals can be written to and read from FITS files and plotted as Mollweide projections.
FreeEOS is a Fortran library for rapidly calculating the equation of state using an efficient free-energy minimization technique that is suitable for physical conditions in stellar interiors. Converged FreeEOS solutions can be reliably determined for the first time for physical conditions occurring in stellar models with masses between 0.1 M☉ and the hydrogen-burning limit near 0.07 M☉ and hot brown-dwarf models just below that limit. However, an initial survey of results for those conditions showed EOS discontinuities (plasma phase transitions) and other problems which will need to be addressed in future work by adjusting the interaction radii characterizing the pressure ionization used for the FreeEOS calculations.
WVT Binning is a spatially adaptive 2-dimensional binning algorithm designed to bin sparse X-ray data. It can handle background subtracted, exposure corrected data to produce intensity images, hardness ratio maps, or temperature maps. The algorithm is an extension of Cappellari & Copin's (2003) Voronoi binning code and uses Weighted Voronoi Tesselations (WVT) to produce a very compact binning structure with a constant S/N per bin. The bin size adjusts to the required resolution in single-pixel steps, which minimizes the scatter around the target S/N. The code is very versatile and can in principle be applied to any type of data. The user manual contains instructions on how to apply the WVT binning code to X-ray data and how to extend the algorithm to other problems.
CORRFIT is a set of routines that use the cross-correlation method to extract parameters of the line-of-sight velocity distribution from galactic spectra and stellar templates observed on the same system. It works best when the broadening function is well sampled at the spectral resolution used (e.g. 200 km/s dispersion at 2 Angstrom resolution). Results become increasingly sensitive to the spectral match between galaxy and template if the broadening function is not well sampled. CORRFIT does not work well for dispersions less than the velocity sampling interval ('delta' in the code) unless the template is perfect.
The concentration-mass relation for dark matter-dominated halos is one of the essential results expected from a theory of structure formation. C-m Emu is a simple numerical code for the c-M relation as a function of cosmological parameters for wCDM models generates the best-fit power-law model for each redshift separately and then interpolate between the redshifts. This produces a more accurate answer at each redshift at the minimal cost of running a fast code for every c -M prediction instead of using one fitting formula. The emulator is constructed from 37 individual models, with three nested N-body gravity-only simulations carried out for each model. The mass range covered by the emulator is 2 x 10^{12} M_sun < M <10^{15} M_sun with a corresponding redshift range of z=0 -1. Over this range of mass and redshift, as well as the variation of cosmological parameters studied, the mean halo concentration varies from c ~ 2 to c ~ 8. The distribution of the concentration at fixed mass is Gaussian with a standard deviation of one-third of the mean value, almost independent of cosmology, mass, and redshift over the ranges probed by the simulations.
VorBin (Voronoi binning method) bins two-dimensional data to a constant signal-to-noise ratio per bin. It optimally solves the problem of preserving the maximum spatial resolution of general two-dimensional data, given a constraint on the minimum signal-to-noise ratio. The method is available in both IDL and Python.
Bonsai is a gravitational N-body tree-code that runs completely on the GPU. This reduces the amount of time spent on communication with the CPU. The code runs on NVIDIA GPUs and on a GTX480 it is able to integrate ~2.8M particles per second. The tree construction and traverse algorithms are portable to many-core devices which have support for CUDA or OpenCL programming languages.
XPHOT is an IDL implementation of a non-parametric method for estimating the apparent and intrinsic broad-band fluxes and absorbing X-ray column densities of weak X-ray sources. XPHOT is intended for faint sources with greater than ∼5-7 counts but fewer than 100-300 counts where parametric spectral fitting methods will be superior. This method is similar to the long-standing use of color-magnitude diagrams in optical and infrared astronomy, with X-ray median energy replacing color index and X-ray source counts replacing magnitude. Though XPHOT was calibrated for thermal spectra characteristic of stars in young stellar clusters, recalibration should be possible for some other classes of faint X-ray sources such as extragalactic active galactic nuclei.
MPWide is a light-weight communication library for distributed computing. It is specifically developed to allow message passing over long-distance networks using path-specific optimizations. An early version of MPWide was used in the Gravitational Billion Body Project to allow simulations across multiple supercomputers.
MOLIERE-5 (Microwave Observation LIne Estimation and REtrieval) is a versatile forward and inversion model for the millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths range and includes an inversion model. The MOLIERE-5 forward model includes modules for the calculation of absorption coefficients, radiative transfer, and instrumental characteristics. The radiative transfer model is supplemented by a sensitivity module for estimating the contribution to the spectrum of each catalog line at its center frequency enabling the model to effectively filter for small spectral lines. The instrument model consists of several independent modules, including the calculation of the convolution of spectra and weighting functions with the spectrometer response functions. The instrument module also provides several options for modeling of frequency-switched observations. The MOLIERE-5 inversion model calculates linear Optimal Estimation, a least-squares retrieval method which uses statistical apriori knowledge on the retrieved parameters for the regularization of ill-posed inversion problems and computes diagnostics such as the measurement and smoothing error covariance matrices along with contribution and averaging kernel functions.
This general complex polynomial root solver, implemented in Fortran and further optimized for binary microlenses, uses a new algorithm to solve polynomial equations and is 1.6-3 times faster than the ZROOTS subroutine that is commercially available from Numerical Recipes, depending on application. The largest improvement, when compared to naive solvers, comes from a fail-safe procedure that permits skipping the majority of the calculations in the great majority of cases, without risking catastrophic failure in the few cases that these are actually required.
CosmoPMC is a Monte-Carlo sampling method to explore the likelihood of various cosmological probes. The sampling engine is implemented with the package pmclib. It is called Population MonteCarlo (PMC), which is a novel technique to sample from the posterior. PMC is an adaptive importance sampling method which iteratively improves the proposal to approximate the posterior. This code has been introduced, tested and applied to various cosmology data sets.
WOLF processes FITS files and generates photometry files, annotated JPGs, opacity maps, background, transient detection and luminance changes detection. This software was used to process data for the Night Sky Live project.
SIR is a general-purpose code capable of dealing with gradients of the physical quantities with height. It admits one and two-component model atmospheres. It allows the recovery of the stratification of the temperature, the magnetic field vector, and the line of sight velocity through the atmosphere, and the micro- and macroturbulence velocities - which are assumed to be constant with depth. It is based on the response functions, which enter a Marquardt nonlinear least-squares algorithm in a natural way. Response functions are calculated at the same time as the full radiative transfer equation for polarized light is integrated, which determines values of many free parameters in a reasonable computation time. SIR demonstrates high stability, accuracy, and uniqueness of results, even when simulated observations present signal-to-noise ratios of the order of the lowest acceptable values in real observations.
Aegean, written in python, finds compact sources within radio images by seeking out islands of pixels above a given threshold and then using the curvature of the image to determine how many Gaussian components should be used to describe the island. The Gaussian fitting is initiated with parameters determined from the curvature and intensity maps, and makes use of mpfit to perform a constrained fit. Aegean has been optimized for compact radio sources in images that have no diffuse background emission, but by pre-processing the images with a spatial filter, or by convolving an optical image with an appropriately small PSF, Aegean is able to produce excellent results in a range of applications.
Synth3 is a non-magnetic spectrum synthesis code. It works with model atmospheres in Kurucz format and VALD Sf line lists and features element stratification, molecular equilibrium and individual microturbulence for each line. Disk integration can be done with s3di which is included in the archive. Synth3 computes spectra emergent from the stellar atmospheres with a depth-dependent chemical composition if depth-dependent abundance is provided in the input model atmosphere file.
DrizzlePac allows users to easily and accurately align and combine HST images taken at multiple epochs, and even with different instruments. It is a suite of supporting tasks for AstroDrizzle which includes:
- astrodrizzle to align and combine images
- tweakreg and tweakback for aligning images in different visits
- pixtopix transforms an X,Y pixel position to its pixel position after distortion corrections
- skytopix transforms sky coordinates to X,Y pixel positions. A reverse transformation can be done using the task pixtosky.
ddisk is an IDL script that calculates the time-evolution of a circumstellar debris disk. It calculates dust abundances over time for a debris-disk that is produced by a planetesimal disk that is grinding away due to collisional erosion.
EXSdetect is a python implementation of an X-ray source detection algorithm which is optimally designed to detected faint extended sources and makes use of Voronoi tessellation and Friend-of-Friend technique. It is a flexible tool capable of detecting extended sources down to the lowest flux levels attainable within instrumental limitations while maintaining robust photometry, high completeness, and low contamination, regardless of source morphology. EXSdetect was developed mainly to exploit the ever-increasing wealth of archival X-ray data, but is also ideally suited to explore the scientific capabilities of future X-ray facilities, with a strong focus on investigations of distant groups and clusters of galaxies.
Thrust is a parallel algorithms library which resembles the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). Thrust's high-level interface greatly enhances programmer productivity while enabling performance portability between GPUs and multicore CPUs. Interoperability with established technologies (such as CUDA, TBB, and OpenMP) facilitates integration with existing software.
The Tübingen NLTE Model-Atmosphere Package (TMAP) is a tool to calculate stellar atmospheres in spherical or plane-parallel geometry in hydrostatic and radiative equilibrium allowing departures from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) for the population of atomic levels. It is based on the Accelerated Lambda Iteration (ALI) method and is able to account for line blanketing by metals. All elements from hydrogen to nickel may be included in the calculation with model atoms which are tailored for the aims of the user.
PSFEx (“PSF Extractor”) extracts models of the Point Spread Function (PSF) from FITS images processed with SExtractor and measures the quality of images. The generated PSF models can be used for model-fitting photometry or morphological analyses.
MARX (Model of AXAF Response to X-rays) is a suite of programs designed to enable the user to simulate the on-orbit performance of the Chandra satellite. MARX provides a detailed ray-trace simulation of how Chandra responds to a variety of astrophysical sources and can generate standard FITS events files and images as output. It contains models for the HRMA mirror system onboard Chandra as well as the HETG and LETG gratings and all focal plane detectors.
ISIS, the Interactive Spectral Interpretation System, is designed to facilitate the interpretation and analysis of high resolution X-ray spectra. It is being developed as a programmable, interactive tool for studying the physics of X-ray spectrum formation, supporting measurement and identification of spectral features, and interaction with a database of atomic structure parameters and plasma emission models.
ALMA Common Software (ACS) provides a software infrastructure common to all ALMA partners and consists of a documented collection of common patterns and components which implement those patterns. The heart of ACS is based on a distributed Component-Container model, with ACS Components implemented as CORBA objects in any of the supported programming languages. ACS provides common CORBA-based services such as logging, error and alarm management, configuration database and lifecycle management. Although designed for ALMA, ACS can and is being used in other control systems and distributed software projects, since it implements proven design patterns using state of the art, reliable technology. It also allows, through the use of well-known standard constructs and components, that other team members whom are not authors of ACS easily understand the architecture of software modules, making maintenance affordable even on a very large project.
pNbody is a parallelized python module toolbox designed to manipulate and interactively display very large N-body systems. It allows the user to perform complicated manipulations with only very few commands and to load an N-body system and explore it interactively using the python interpreter. pNbody may also be used in python scripts. pNbody contains graphical facilities for creating maps of physical values of the system, such as density, temperature, and velocities maps. Stereo capabilities are also implemented. pNbody is not limited by file format; the user may use a parameter file to redefine how to read a preferred format.
EPICS is a set of software tools and applications developed collaboratively and used to create distributed soft real-time control systems for scientific instruments such as particle accelerators and telescopes. Such distributed control systems typically comprise tens or even hundreds of computers, networked together to allow communication between them and to provide control and feedback of the various parts of the device from a central control room, or even remotely over the internet. EPICS uses Client/Server and Publish/Subscribe techniques to communicate between the various computers. A Channel Access Gateway allows engineers and physicists elsewhere in the building to examine the current state of the IOCs, but prevents them from making unauthorized adjustments to the running system. In many cases the engineers can make a secure internet connection from home to diagnose and fix faults without having to travel to the site.
EPICS is used by many facilities worldwide, including the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Laboratory, Fermilab, Keck Observatory, Laboratori Nazionali di Legnaro, Brazilian Synchrotron Light Source, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Australian Synchrotron, and Stanford Linear Accellerator Center.
Minerva is a cylindrical coordinate extension of the Athena astrophysical MHD code of Stone, Gardiner, Teuben, and Hawley. The extension follows the approach of Athena's original developers and has been designed to alter the existing Cartesian-coordinates code as minimally and transparently as possible. The numerical equations in cylindrical coordinates are formulated to maintain consistency with constrained transport (CT), a central feature of the Athena algorithm, while making use of previously implemented code modules such as the Riemann solvers. Angular momentum transport, which is critical in astrophysical disk systems dominated by rotation, is treated carefully.
GRID-core is a core-finding method using the contours of the local gravitational potential to identify core boundaries. The GRID-core method applied to 2D surface density and 3D volume density are in good agreement for bound cores. We have implemented a version of the GRID-core algorithm in IDL, suitable for core-finding in observed maps. The required input is a two-dimensional FITS file containing a map of the column density in a region of a cloud.
PSF fitting photometry allows a simultaneously fit of a PSF profile on the sources. Many routines use PSF fitting photometry, including IRAF/allstar, Strarfinder, and Convphot. These routines are in general complex to use and slow. FASTPHOT is optimized for prior extraction (the position of the sources is known) and is very fast and simple.
This IDL library is designed to be used on astronomical images. Its main aim is to stack data to allow a statistical detection of faint signal, using a prior. For instance, you can stack 160um data using the positions of galaxies detected at 24um or 3.6um, or use WMAP sources to stack Planck data. It can estimate error bars using bootstrap, and it can perform photometry (aperture photometry, or PSF fitting, or other that you can plug). The IAS Stacking Library works with gnomonic projections (RA---TAN), and also with HEALPIX projection.
ICORE is a command-line driven co-addition, mosaicking, and resolution enhancement (HiRes) tool for creating science quality products from image data in FITS format and with World Coordinate System information following the FITS-WCS standard. It includes preparatory steps such as image background matching, photometric gain-matching, and pixel-outlier rejection. Co-addition and/or HiRes'ing can be performed in either the inertial WCS or in the rest frame of a moving object. Three interpolation methods are supported: overlap-area weighting, drizzle, and weighting by the detector Point Response Function (PRF). The latter enables the creation of matched-filtered products for optimal point-source detection, but most importantly allows for resolution enhancement using a spatially-dependent deconvolution method. This is a variant of the classic Richardson-Lucy algorithm with the added benefit to simultaneously register and co-add multiple images to optimize signal-to-noise and sampling of the instrumental PSF. It can assume real (or otherwise "flat") image priors, mitigate "ringing" artifacts, and assess the quality of image solutions using statistically-motivated convergence criteria. Uncertainties are also estimated and internally validated for all products. The software supports multithreading that can be configured for different architectures. Numerous example scripts are included (with test data) to co-add and/or HiRes image data from Spitzer-IRAC/MIPS, WISE, and Herschel-SPIRE.
GALA is a freely distributed Fortran code to derive the atmospheric parameters (temperature, gravity, microturbulent velocity and overall metallicity) and abundances for individual species of stellar spectra using the classical method based on the equivalent widths of metallic lines. The abundances of individual spectral lines are derived by using the WIDTH9 code developed by R. L. Kurucz. GALA is designed to obtain the best model atmosphere, by optimizing temperature, surface gravity, microturbulent velocity and metallicity, after rejecting the discrepant lines. Finally, it computes accurate internal errors for each atmospheric parameter and abundance. The code obtains chemical abundances and atmospheric parameters for large stellar samples quickly, thus making GALA an useful tool in the epoch of the multi-object spectrographs and large surveys.
ME(SSY)**2 stands for “Monte-carlo Experiments with Spherically SYmmetric Stellar SYstems." This code simulates the long term evolution of spherical clusters of stars; it was devised specifically to treat dense galactic nuclei. It is based on the pioneering Monte Carlo scheme proposed by Hénon in the 70's and includes all relevant physical ingredients (2-body relaxation, stellar mass spectrum, collisions, tidal disruption, ldots). It is basically a Monte Carlo resolution of the Fokker-Planck equation. It can cope with any stellar mass spectrum or velocity distribution. Being a particle-based method, it also allows one to take stellar collisions into account in a very realistic way. This unique code, featuring most important physical processes, allows million particle simulations, spanning a Hubble time, in a few CPU days on standard personal computers and provides a wealth of data only rivalized by N-body simulations. The current version of the software requires the use of routines from the "Numerical Recipes in Fortran 77" (http://www.nrbook.com/a/bookfpdf.php).
NIFTY (Numerical Information Field TheorY) is a versatile library enables the development of signal inference algorithms that operate regardless of the underlying spatial grid and its resolution. Its object-oriented framework is written in Python, although it accesses libraries written in Cython, C++, and C for efficiency. NIFTY offers a toolkit that abstracts discretized representations of continuous spaces, fields in these spaces, and operators acting on fields into classes. Thereby, the correct normalization of operations on fields is taken care of automatically. This allows for an abstract formulation and programming of inference algorithms, including those derived within information field theory. Thus, NIFTY permits rapid prototyping of algorithms in 1D and then the application of the developed code in higher-dimensional settings of real world problems. NIFTY operates on point sets, n-dimensional regular grids, spherical spaces, their harmonic counterparts, and product spaces constructed as combinations of those.
SYNMAG is a tool for producing synthetic aperture magnitudes to enable fast matched photometry at the catalog level without reprocessing imaging data. Aperture magnitudes are the most widely tabulated flux measurements in survey catalogs; obtaining reliable, matched photometry for galaxies imaged by different observatories represents a key challenge in the era of wide-field surveys spanning more than several hundred square degrees. Methods such as flux fitting, profile fitting, and PSF homogenization followed by matched-aperture photometry are all computationally expensive. An alternative solution called "synthetic aperture photometry" exploits galaxy profile fits in one band to efficiently model the observed, point-spread-function-convolved light profile in other bands and predict the flux in arbitrarily sized apertures.
DisPerSE is open source software for the identification of persistent topological features such as peaks, voids, walls and in particular filamentary structures within noisy sampled distributions in 2D, 3D. Using DisPerSE, structure identification can be achieved through the computation of the discrete Morse-Smale complex. The software can deal directly with noisy datasets via the concept of persistence (a measure of the robustness of topological features). Although developed for the study of the properties of filamentary structures in the cosmic web of galaxy distribution over large scales in the Universe, the present version is quite versatile and should be useful for any application where a robust structure identification is required, such as for segmentation or for studying the topology of sampled functions (for example, computing persistent Betti numbers). Currently, it can be applied can work indifferently on many kinds of cell complex (such as structured and unstructured grids, 2D manifolds embedded within a 3D space, discrete point samples using delaunay tesselation, and Healpix tesselations of the sphere). The only constraint is that the distribution must be defined over a manifold, possibly with boundaries.
XDQSO, written in IDL, calculates photometric quasar probabilities to mimick SDSS-III’s BOSS quasar target selection or photometric redshifts for quasars, whether in three redshift ranges (z < 2.2; 2.2 leq z leq 3.5; z > 3.5) or arbitrary redshift ranges.
The ESO-MIDAS system provides general tools for image processing and data reduction with emphasis on astronomical applications including imaging and special reduction packages for ESO instrumentation at La Silla and the VLT at Paranal. In addition it contains applications packages for stellar and surface photometry, image sharpening and decomposition, statistics, data fitting, data presentation in graphical form, and more.
SWIFT follows the long-term dynamical evolution of a swarm of test particles in the solar system. The code efficiently and accurately handles close approaches between test particles and planets while retaining the powerful features of recently developed mixed variable symplectic integrators. Four integration techniques are included: Wisdom-Holman Mapping; Regularized Mixed Variable Symplectic (RMVS) method; fourth order T+U Symplectic (TU4) method; and Bulirsch-Stoer method. The package is designed so that the calls to each of these look identical so that it is trivial to replace one with another. Complex data manipulations and results can be analyzed with the graphics packace SwiftVis.
emcee is an extensible, pure-Python implementation of Goodman & Weare's Affine Invariant Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) Ensemble sampler. It's designed for Bayesian parameter estimation. The algorithm behind emcee has several advantages over traditional MCMC sampling methods and has excellent performance as measured by the autocorrelation time (or function calls per independent sample). One advantage of the algorithm is that it requires hand-tuning of only 1 or 2 parameters compared to $sim N^2$ for a traditional algorithm in an N-dimensional parameter space. Exploiting the parallelism of the ensemble method, emcee permits any user to take advantage of multiple CPU cores without extra effort.
CosmoHammer is a Python framework for the estimation of cosmological parameters. The software embeds the Python package emcee by Foreman-Mackey et al. (2012) and gives the user the possibility to plug in modules for the computation of any desired likelihood. The major goal of the software is to reduce the complexity when one wants to extend or replace the existing computation by modules which fit the user's needs as well as to provide the possibility to easily use large scale computing environments. CosmoHammer can efficiently distribute the MCMC sampling over thousands of cores on modern cloud computing infrastructure.
UCL_PDR is a time dependent photon-dissociation regions model that calculates self consistently the thermal balance. It can be used with gas phase only species as well as with surface species. It is very modular, has the possibility of accounting for density and pressure gradients and can be coupled with UCL_CHEM as well as with SMMOL. It has been used to model small scale (e.g. knots in proto-planetary nebulae) to large scale regions (high redshift galaxies).
SMMOL (Spherical Multi-level MOLecular line radiative transfer) is a molecular line radiative transfer code that uses Accelerated Lambda Iteration to solve the coupled level population and line transfer problem in spherical geometry. The code uses a discretized grid and a ray tracing methodology. SMMOL is designed for high optical depth regimes and can cope with maser emission as long as the spatial-velocity sampling is fine enough.
UCLCHEM is a time and depth dependent gas-grain chemical model that can be used to estimate the fractional abundances (with respect to hydrogen) of gas and surface species in every environment where molecules are present. The model includes both gas and surface reactions. The code starts from the most diffuse state where all the gas is in atomic form and evolve sthe gas to its final density. Depending on the temperature, atoms and molecules from the gas freeze on to the grains and they hydrogenate where possible. The advantage of this approach is that the ice composition is not assumed but it is derived by a time-dependent computation of the chemical evolution of the gas-dust interaction process. The code is very modular, has been used to model a variety of regions and can be coupled with the UCL_PDR and SMMOL codes.
micrOMEGAs calculates the properties of cold dark matter in a generic model of particle physics. First developed to compute the relic density of dark matter, the code also computes the rates for dark matter direct and indirect detection. The code provides the mass spectrum, cross-sections, relic density and exotic fluxes of gamma rays, positrons and antiprotons. The propagation of charged particles in the Galactic halo is handled with a module that allows to easily modify the propagation parameters. The cross-sections for both spin dependent and spin independent interactions of WIMPS on protons are computed automatically as well as the rates for WIMP scattering on nuclei in a large detector. Annihilation cross-sections of the dark matter candidate at zero velocity, relevant for indirect detection of dark matter, are computed automatically, and the propagation of charged particles in the Galactic halo is also handled.
TYCHO is a general, one dimensional (spherically symmetric) stellar evolution code written in structured Fortran 77; it is designed for hydrostatic and hydrodynamic stages including mass loss, accretion, pulsations and explosions. Mixing and convection algorithms are based on 3D time-dependent simulations. It offers extensive on-line graphics using Tim Pearson's PGPLOT (ascl:1103.002) with X-windows and runs effectively on Linux and Mac OS X laptop and desktop computers.
NOTE: This code is no longer being supported.
MAGIX provides an interface between existing codes and an iterating engine that minimizes deviations of the model results from available observational data; it constrains the values of the model parameters and provides corresponding error estimates. Many models (and, in principle, not only astrophysical models) can be plugged into MAGIX to explore their parameter space and find the set of parameter values that best fits observational/experimental data. MAGIX complies with the data structures and reduction tools of Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA), but can be used with other astronomical and with non-astronomical data.
TAC-maker allows for rapid and interactive calculation of synthetic planet transits by numerical computations of the integrals, allowing the use of an arbitrary limb-darkening law of the host star. This advantage together with the practically arbitrary precision of the calculations makes the code a valuable tool for the continuously increasing photometric precision of ground-based and space observations.
MOPSIC was created to analyze bolometer data but can be used for much more versatile tasks. It is an extension of MOPSI; this software had been merged with the command interpreter of GILDAS (ascl:1305.010). For data reduction, MOPSIC uses a special method to calculate the chopped signal. This gives much better results than the straight difference of the signals obtained at both chopper positions. In addition there are also scripts to reduce pointings, skydips, and to calculate the RCPs (Receiver Channel Parameters) from calibration maps. MOPSIC offers a much broader range of applications including advanced planning functions for mapping and onoff observations, post-reduction data analysis and processing and even reduction of non-bolometer data (optical, IR, spectroscopy).
TGCat is an archive of Chandra transmission grating spectra and a suite of software for processing such data. Users can browse and categorize Chandra gratings observations quickly and easily, generate custom plots of resulting response corrected spectra on-line without the need for special software and download analysis ready products from multiple observations in one convenient operation. Data processing for the catalog is done with a suite of ISIS/S-Lang scripts; the software is available for download. These ISIS scripts wrap and call CIAO tools for reprocessing from "Level 1" (acis_process_events or hrc_process_events) through "Level 2" (binned spectra, via tg_resolve_events and tgextract), compute responses (grating "RMFs" and "ARFs", via mkgrmf and mkgarf), and make summary plots.
Spectrum created by energy release in the early Universe, before recombination, creates distortions which are a superposition of μ-type, y-type and intermediate-type distortions. The final spectrum can thus be constructed from the templates, once energy injection rate as a function of redshift is known. This package contains the templates spaced at dy=0.001 for y<1 and dy=0.01 for y>1 covering a range 0.001 < y < 10. Also included is a Mathematica code which can combine these templates for user-defined rate of energy injection as a function of redshift. Silk damping, particle decay and annihilation examples are also included.
BSE is a rapid binary star evolution code. It can model circularization of eccentric orbits and synchronization of stellar rotation with the orbital motion owing to tidal interaction in detail. Angular momentum loss mechanisms, such as gravitational radiation and magnetic braking, are also modelled. Wind accretion, where the secondary may accrete some of the material lost from the primary in a wind, is allowed with the necessary adjustments made to the orbital parameters in the event of any mass variations. Mass transfer occurs if either star fills its Roche lobe and may proceed on a nuclear, thermal or dynamical time-scale. In the latter regime, the radius of the primary increases in response to mass-loss at a faster rate than the Roche-lobe of the star. Prescriptions to determine the type and rate of mass transfer, the response of the secondary to accretion and the outcome of any merger events are in place in BSE.
SSE is a rapid single-star evolution (SSE) code; these analytical formulae cover all phases of evolution from the zero-age main-sequence up to and including remnant phases. It is valid for masses in the range 0.1-100 Msun and metallicity can be varied. The SSE package contains a prescription for mass loss by stellar winds. It also follows the evolution of rotational angular momentum for the star.
2MASS Kit is an open source software for use in easily constructing a high performance search server for important astronomical catalogs. It is tuned for optimal coordinate search performance (Radial Search, Box Search, Rectangular Search) of huge catalogs, thus increasing the speed by more than an order of magnitude when compared to simple indexing on a single table. Optimal conditions enable more than 3,000 searches per second for radial search of 2MASS PSC. The kit is best characterized by its flexible tuning. Each table index is registered in one of six table spaces (each resides in a separate directory), thus allowing only the essential parts to be easily moved onto fast devices. Given the terrific evolution that has taken place with recent SSDs in performance, a very cost-effective way of constructing high-performance servers is moving part of or all table indices to a fast SSD.
CADRE, the Combined Array for Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) data reduction pipeline, gives investigators a first look at a fully reduced set of their data. It runs automatically on all data produced by the telescope as they arrive in the data archive. The pipeline is written in python and uses python wrappers for MIRIAD subroutines for direct access to the data. It applies passband, gain and flux calibration to the data sets and produces a set of continuum and spectral line maps in both MIRIAD and FITS format.
Galactus, written in python, is an astronomical software tool for the modeling and fitting of galaxies from neutral hydrogen (HI) cubes. Galactus uses a uniform medium to generate a cube. Galactus can perform the full-radiative transfer for the HI, so can model self-absorption in the galaxy.
GBTIDL is an interactive package for reduction and analysis of spectral line data taken with the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope (GBT). The package, written entirely in IDL, consists of straightforward yet flexible calibration, averaging, and analysis procedures (the "GUIDE layer") modeled after the UniPOPS and CLASS data reduction philosophies, a customized plotter with many built-in visualization features, and Data I/O and toolbox functionality that can be used for more advanced tasks. GBTIDL makes use of data structures which can also be used to store intermediate results. The package consumes and produces data in GBT SDFITS format. GBTIDL can be run online and have access to the most recent data coming off the telescope, or can be run offline on preprocessed SDFITS files.
Ginga is a viewer for astronomical data FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files; the viewer centers around a FITS display widget which supports zooming and panning, color and intensity mapping, a choice of several automatic cut levels algorithms and canvases for plotting scalable geometric forms. In addition to this widget, the FITS viewer provides a flexible plugin framework for extending the viewer with many different features. A fairly complete set of "standard" plugins are provided for expected features of a modern viewer: panning and zooming windows, star catalog access, cuts, star pick/fwhm, thumbnails, and others. This viewer was written by software engineers at Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and is in use at that facility.
Xmatch is a cross-platform, multi-GPU tool which allows for extremely fast cross-matching between two Astronomic catalogs. It is capable of asyncronously managing multiple GPUs, ideal for workstation and cluster environments.
ionFR calculates the amount of ionospheric Faraday rotation for a specific epoch, geographic location, and line-of-sight. The code uses a number of publicly available, GPS-derived total electron content maps and the most recent release of the International Geomagnetic Reference Field. ionFR can be used for the calibration of radio polarimetric observations; its accuracy had been demonstrated using LOFAR pulsar observations.
pysynphot is a synthetic photometry software package suitable for either library or interactive use. Intended as a modern-language successor to the IRAF/STSDAS synphot package, it provides improved algorithms that address known shortcomings in synphot, and its object-oriented design is more easily extensible than synphot's task-oriented approach. It runs under PyRAF (ascl:1207.011), and a backwards compatibility mode is provided that recognizes all spectral and throughput tables, obsmodes, and spectral expressions used by synphot, to facilitate the transition for legacy code.
ATLAS12 is an opacity sampling model atmosphere program to allow computation of models with individual abundances using line data. ATLAS12 is able to compute the same models as ATLAS9 which uses pretabulated opacities, plus models with arbitrary abundances. ATLAS12 sampled fluxes are quite accurate for predicting the total flux except in the intermediate or narrow bandpass intervals because the sample size is too small.
DPUSER is an interactive language capable of handling numbers (both real and complex), strings, and matrices. Its main aim is to do astronomical image analysis, for which it provides a comprehensive set of functions, but it can also be used for many other applications.
ACORNS-ADI, written in python, is a parallelized software package which reduces high-contrast imaging data. Originally written for imaging data from Subaru/HiCIAO, it requires minimal modification to reduce data from other instruments. It is efficient, open-source, and includes several optional features which may improve performance.
The algorithm Gaussian processes can reconstruct a function from a sample of data without assuming a parameterization of the function. The GaPP code can be used on any dataset to reconstruct a function. It handles individual error bars on the data and can be used to determine the derivatives of the reconstructed function. The data sample can consist of observations of the function and of its first derivative.
Cosmic ray electrons scatter on the photon fields around stars, including the sun, to create gamma rays by the inverse Compton effect. Stellarics computes the spectrum and angular distribution of this emission. The software also includes general-purpose routines for inverse Compton scattering on a given electron spectrum, for example for interstellar or astrophysical source modelling.
iSAP consists of three programs, written in IDL, which together are useful for spherical data analysis. MR/S (MultiResolution on the Sphere) contains routines for wavelet, ridgelet and curvelet transform on the sphere, and applications such denoising on the sphere using wavelets and/or curvelets, Gaussianity tests and Independent Component Analysis on the Sphere. MR/S has been designed for the PLANCK project, but can be used for many other applications. SparsePol (Polarized Spherical Wavelets and Curvelets) has routines for polarized wavelet, polarized ridgelet and polarized curvelet transform on the sphere, and applications such denoising on the sphere using wavelets and/or curvelets, Gaussianity tests and blind source separation on the Sphere. SparsePol has been designed for the PLANCK project. MS-VSTS (Multi-Scale Variance Stabilizing Transform on the Sphere), designed initially for the FERMI project, is useful for spherical mono-channel and multi-channel data analysis when the data are contaminated by a Poisson noise. It contains routines for wavelet/curvelet denoising, wavelet deconvolution, multichannel wavelet denoising and deconvolution.
Sunrise is a Monte Carlo radiation transfer code for calculating absorption and scattering of light to study the effects of dust in hydrodynamic simulations of interacting galaxies. It uses an adaptive mesh refinement grid to describe arbitrary geometries of emitting and absorbing/scattering media, with spatial dynamical range exceeding 104; it can efficiently generate images of the emerging radiation at arbitrary points in space and spectral energy distributions of simulated galaxies run with the Gadget (ascl:0003.001), Gasoline (ascl:1710.019), Arepo (ascl:1909.010), Enzo (ascl:1010.072) or ART codes. In addition to the monochromatic radiative transfer typically used by Monte Carlo codes, Sunrise can propagate a range of wavelengths simultaneously. This "polychromatic" algorithm gives significant improvements in efficiency and accuracy when spectral features are calculated.
The PEC (Period Error Calculator) algorithm estimates the period error for eclipsing binaries observed by the Kepler Mission. The algorithm is based on propagation of error theory and assumes that observation of every light curve peak/minimum in a long time-series observation can be unambiguously identified. A simple C implementation of the PEC algorithm is available.
Astropy provides a common framework, core package of code, and affiliated packages for astronomy in Python. Development is actively ongoing, with major packages such as PyFITS, PyWCS, vo, and asciitable already merged in. Astropy is intended to contain much of the core functionality and some common tools needed for performing astronomy and astrophysics with Python.
GALSVM is IDL software for automated morphology classification. It was specially designed for high redshift data but can be used at low redshift as well. It analyzes morphologies of galaxies based on a particular family of learning machines called support vector machines. The method can be seen as a generalization of the classical CAS classification but with an unlimited number of dimensions and non-linear boundaries between decision regions. It is fully automated and consequently well adapted to large cosmological surveys.
Wqed (pronounced "Wicked") is a set of tools developed by the Delaware Asteroseismic Research Center (DARC) to simplify the process of reducing time-series CCD data on variable stars. It does not provide tools to measure the brightness of stars in individual frames, focusing instead on what comes next:
VOBOZ (VOronoi BOund Zones) is an algorithm to find haloes in an N-body dark matter simulation which has little dependence on free parameters.
ZOBOV (ZOnes Bordering On Voidness) is an algorithm that finds density depressions in a set of points without any free parameters or assumptions about shape. It uses the Voronoi tessellation to estimate densities to find both voids and subvoids. It also measures probabilities that each void or subvoid arises from Poisson fluctuations.
CosmicEmuLog is a simple Python emulator for cosmological power spectra. In addition to the power spectrum of the conventional overdensity field, it emulates the power spectra of the log-density as well as the Gaussianized density. It models fluctuations in the power spectrum at each k as a linear combination of contributions from fluctuations in each cosmological parameter. The data it uses for emulation consist of ASCII files of the mean power spectrum, together with derivatives of the power spectrum with respect to the five cosmological parameters in the space spanned by the Coyote Universe suite. This data can also be used for Fisher matrix analysis. At present, CosmicEmuLog is restricted to redshift 0.
DESPOTIC (Derive the Energetics and SPectra of Optically Thick Interstellar Clouds), written in Python, represents optically thick interstellar clouds using a one-zone model and calculates line luminosities, line cooling rates, and in restricted cases line profiles using an escape probability formalism. DESPOTIC calculates clouds' equilibrium gas and dust temperatures and their time-dependent thermal evolution. The code allows rapid and interactive calculation of clouds' characteristic temperatures, identification of their dominant heating and cooling mechanisms, and prediction of their observable spectra across a wide range of interstellar environments.
Diffusion.f is an exportable subroutine to calculate the diffusion of elements in stars. The routine solves exactly the Burgers equations and can include any number of elements as variables. The code has been used successfully by a number of different groups; applications include diffusion in the sun and diffusion in globular cluster stars. There are many other possible applications to main sequence and to evolved stars. The associated README file explains how to use the subroutine.
Sérsic is an implementation of the exact deprojection of Sérsic surface brightness profiles described in Baes and Gentile (2011). This code depends on the mpmath python library for an implementation of the Meijer G function required by the Baes and Gentile (hereafter B+G) formulas for rational values of the Sérsic index. Sérsic requires rational Sérsic indices, but any irrational number can be approximated arbitrarily well by some rational number. The code also depends on scipy, but the dependence is mostly for testing. The implementation of the formulas and the formulas themselves have undergone comprehensive testing.
TPZ, a parallel code written in python, produces robust and accurate photometric redshift PDFs by using prediction tree and random forests. The code also produces ancillary information about the sample used, such as prior unbiased errors estimations (giving an estimation of performance) and a ranking of importance of variables as well as a map of performance indicating where extra training data is needed to improve overall performance. It is designed to be easy to use and a tutorial is available.
ORIGAMI is a dynamical method of determining the morphology of particles in a cosmological simulation by checking for whether, and in how many dimensions, a particle has undergone shell-crossing. The code is written in C and makes use of the Delaunay tessellation calculation routines from the VOBOZ package (which relies on the Qhull package).
SFH is an efficient IDL tool that quickly computes accurate predictions for the baryon budget history in a galactic halo.
MPgrafic is a parallel MPI version of Grafic-1 (ascl:9910.004) which can produce large cosmological initial conditions on a cluster without requiring shared memory. The real Fourier transforms are carried in place using fftw while minimizing the amount of used memory (at the expense of performance) in the spirit of Grafic-1. The writing of the output file is also carried in parallel. In addition to the technical parallelization, it provides three extensions over Grafic-1:
TVD solves the magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equations by updating the fluid variables along each direction using the flux-conservative, second-order, total variation diminishing (TVD), upwind scheme of Jin & Xin. The magnetic field is updated separately in two-dimensional advection-constraint steps. The electromotive force (EMF) is computed in the advection step using the TVD scheme, and this same EMF is used immediately in the constraint step in order to preserve ∇˙B=0 without the need to store intermediate fluxes. The code is extended to three dimensions using operator splitting, and Runge-Kutta is used to get second-order accuracy in time. TVD offers high-resolution per grid cell, second-order accuracy in space and time, and enforcement of the ∇˙B=0 constraint to machine precision. Written in Fortran, It has no memory overhead and is fast. It is also available in a fully scalable message-passing parallel MPI implementation.
Qhull computes the convex hull, Delaunay triangulation, Voronoi diagram, halfspace intersection about a point, furthest-site Delaunay triangulation, and furthest-site Voronoi diagram. The source code runs in 2-d, 3-d, 4-d, and higher dimensions. Qhull implements the Quickhull algorithm for computing the convex hull. It handles roundoff errors from floating point arithmetic. It computes volumes, surface areas, and approximations to the convex hull.
CosmoRec solves the recombination problem including recombinations to highly excited states, corrections to the 2s-1s two-photon channel, HI Lyn-feedback, n>2 two-photon profile corrections, and n≥2 Raman-processes. The code can solve the radiative transfer equation of the Lyman-series photon field to obtain the required modifications to the rate equations of the resolved levels, and handles electron scattering, the effect of HeI intercombination transitions, and absorption of helium photons by hydrogen. It also allows accounting for dark matter annihilation and optionally includes detailed helium radiative transfer effects.
SZpack is a numerical library which allows fast and precise computation of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich (SZ) signal for hot, moving clusters of galaxies. Both explicit numerical integration as well as approximate representation of the SZ signals can be obtained. Variations of the electron temperature and bulk velocity along the line-of-sight can be included. SZpack allows very fast and precise (<~0.001% at frequencies h nu <~ 30kT_g and electron temperature kTe ~ 75 keV) computation and its accuracy practically eliminates uncertainties related to more expensive numerical evaluation of the Boltzmann collision term. It furthermore cleanly separates kinematic corrections from scattering physics, effects that previously have not been clarified.
IFrIT (Ionization FRont Interactive Tool) is a powerful general purpose visualization tool that can be used to visualize 3-dimensional data sets. IFrIT is written in C++ and is based on the Visualization ToolKit (VTK) and, optionally, uses a GUI toolkit Qt. IFrIT can visualize scalar, vector field, tensor, and particle data. Several visualization windows can exist at the same time, each one having a full set of visualization objects. Some visualization windows can share the data between them, while other windows can be fully independent. Images from several visualization windows can be combined into one image file on the disk, tiling some windows together, and inserting reduced versions of some windows into larger other windows. A large array of features is also available, including highly advanced animation capabilities, a complex set of lights, markers to label various points in space, and a capability to "pick" a point in the scene and retrieve information about the data at this location.
PyCloudy is a Python library that handles input and output files of the Cloudy photoionization code (Gary Ferland). It can also generate 3D nebula from various runs of the 1D Cloudy code. pyCloudy allows you to:
- define and write input file(s) for Cloudy code. As you can have it in a code, you may generate automatically sets of input files, changing parameters from one to the other.<
- read the Cloudy output files and play with the data: you will be able to plot line emissivity ratio vs. the radius of the nebula, the electron temperature, or any Cloudy output.
- build pseudo-3D models, a la Cloudy_3D, by running a set of models, changing parameters (e.g. inner radius, density) following angular laws, reading the outputs of the set of models and interpolating the results (Te, ne, line emissivities) in a 3D cube.
PyNeb (previously PyNebular) is an update and expansion of the IRAF package NEBULAR; rewritten in Python, it is designed to be more user-friendly and powerful, increasing the speed, easiness of use, and graphic visualization of emission lines analysis. In PyNeb, the atom is represented as an n-level atom. For given density and temperature, PyNeb solves the equilibrium equations and determines the level populations. PyNeb can compute physical conditions from suitable diagnostic line ratios and level populations, critical densities and line emissivities, and can compute and display emissivity grids as a function of Te and Ne. It can also deredden line intensities, read and manage observational data, and plot and compare atomic data from different publications, and compute ionic abundances from line intensities and physical conditions and elemental abundances from ionic abundances and icfs.
Copter is a software package for doing calculations in cosmological perturbation theory. Specifically, Copter includes code for computing statistical observables in the large-scale structure of matter using various forms of perturbation theory, including linear theory, standard perturbation theory, renormalized perturbation theory, and many others. Copter is written in C++ and makes use of the Boost C++ library headers.
The ESTER code computes the steady state of an isolated star of mass larger than two solar masses. The only convective region computed as such is the core where isentropy is assumed. ESTER provides solutions of the partial differential equations, for the pressure, density, temperature, angular velocity and meridional velocity for the whole volume. The angular velocity (differential rotation) and meridional circulation are computed consistently with the structure and are driven by the baroclinic torque. The code uses spectral methods, both radially and horizontally, with spherical harmonics and Chebyshev polynomials. The iterations follow Newton's algorithm. The code is object-oriented and is written in C++; a python suite allows an easy visualization of the results. While running, PGPLOT graphs are displayed to show evolution of the iterations.
Pynbody is a lightweight, portable, format-transparent analysis package for astrophysical N-body and smooth particle hydrodynamic simulations supporting PKDGRAV/Gasoline, Gadget, N-Chilada, and RAMSES AMR outputs. Written in python, the core tools are accompanied by a library of publication-level analysis routines.
TPM carries out collisionless (dark matter) cosmological N-body simulations, evolving a system of N particles as they move under their mutual gravitational interaction. It combines aspects of both Tree and Particle-Mesh algorithms. After the global PM forces are calculated, spatially distinct regions above a given density contrast are located; the tree code calculates the gravitational interactions inside these denser objects at higher spatial and temporal resolution. The code is parallel and uses MPI for message passing.
AdaptaHOP is a structure and substructure detector. It reads an input particle distribution file and can compute the mean square distance between each particle and its nearest neighbors or the SPH density associated to each particle + the list of its nearest neighbors. It can also read an input particle distribution and a neighbors file (output from a previous run) and output the tree of the structures in structures.
PkdGRAV2 is a high performance N-body treecode for self-gravitating astrophysical simulations. It is designed to run efficiently in serial and on a wide variety of parallel computers including both shared memory and message passing architectures. It can spatially adapt to large ranges in particle densities, and temporally adapt to large ranges in dynamical timescales. The code uses a non-standard data structure for efficiently calculating the gravitational forces, a variant on the k-D tree, and a novel method for treating periodic boundary conditions.
Pressure-Entropy SPH, a modified version of GADGET-2, uses the Lagrangian “Pressure-Entropy” formulation of the SPH equations. This removes the spurious “surface tension” force substantially improving the treatment of fluid mixing and contact discontinuities. Pressure-Entropy SPH shows good performance in mixing experiments (e.g. Kelvin-Helmholtz & blob tests), with conservation maintained even in strong shock/blastwave tests, where formulations without manifest conservation produce large errors. This improves the treatment of sub-sonic turbulence and lessens the need for large kernel particle numbers.
PINOCCHIO generates catalogues of cosmological dark matter halos with known mass, position, velocity and merger history. It is able to reproduce, with very good accuracy, the hierarchical formation of dark matter halos from a realization of an initial (linear) density perturbation field, given on a 3D grid. Its setup is similar to that of a conventional N-body simulation, but it is based on the powerful Lagrangian Perturbation Theory. It runs in just a small fraction of the computing time taken by an equivalent N-body simulation, producing promptly the merging histories of all halos in the catalog.
YNOGK, written in Fortran, calculates the null geodesics in the Kerr spacetime. It uses Weierstrass' and Jacobi's elliptic functions to express all coordinates and affine parameters as analytical and numerical functions of a parameter $p$, which is an integral value along the geodesic. The information about the turning points do not need to be specified in advance by the user, allowing applications such as imaging, the calculation of line profiles or the observer-emitter problem to become root finding problems. Elliptic integrations are computed by Carlson's elliptic integral method, which allows fast computation.
GaussFit solves least squares and robust estimation problems; written originally for reduction of NASA Hubble Space Telescope data, it includes a complete programming language designed especially to formulate estimation problems, a built-in compiler and interpreter to support the programming language, and a built-in algebraic manipulator for calculating the required partial derivatives analytically. The code can handle nonlinear models, exact constraints, correlated observations, and models where the equations of condition contain more than one observed quantity. Written in C, GaussFit includes an experimental robust estimation capability so data sets contaminated by outliers can be handled simply and efficiently.
GILDAS is a collection of software oriented toward (sub-)millimeter radioastronomical applications (either single-dish or interferometer). It has been adopted as the IRAM standard data reduction package and is jointly maintained by IRAM & CNRS. GILDAS contains many facilities, most of which are oriented towards spectral line mapping and many kinds of 3-dimensional data. The code, written in Fortran-90 with a few parts in C/C++ (mainly keyboard interaction, plotting, widgets), is easily extensible.
FITDisk models accretion disk phenomena using a fully three-dimensional hydrodynamics calculation, and data can either be visualized as they are computed or stored to hard drive for later playback at a fast frame rate. Simulations are visualized using OpenGL graphics and the viewing angle can be changed interactively. Pseudo light curves of simulated systems can be plotted along with the associated Fourier amplitude spectrum. It provides an easy to use graphical user interface as well as 3-D interactive graphics. The code computes the evolution of a CV accretion disk, visualizes results in real time, records and plays back simulations, and generates and plots pseudo light curves and associated power spectra. FITDisk is the Windows executable form of this software; its Fortran source code is also available as DiskSim (ascl:1811.013).
The MapCUMBA package applies a multigrid fast iterative Jacobi algorithm for map-making in the context of CMB experiments.
Non-Gaussian Realisations provides code based on a spectral distortion/quantile transformation that generates a realization of a field on a cubic grid that has a specified probability distribution function and a specified power spectrum.
TAU is a 1D line-by-line radiative transfer code for modeling transmission spectra of close-in extrasolar planets. The code calculates the optical path through the planetary atmosphere of the radiation from the host star and quantifies the absorption due to the modeled composition in a transmission spectrum of transit depth as a function of wavelength. The code is written in C++ and is parallelized using OpenMP.
Merger Trees uses a Monte Carlo algorithm to generate merger trees describing the formation history of dark matter haloes; the algorithm is implemented in Fortran. The algorithm is a modification of the algorithm of Cole et al. used in the GALFORM semi-analytic galaxy formation model (ascl:1510.005) based on the Extended Press–Schechter theory. It should be applicable to hierarchical models with a wide range of power spectra and cosmological models. It is tuned to be in accurate agreement with the conditional mass functions found in the analysis of merger trees extracted from the Λ cold dark matter Millennium N-body simulation. The code should be a useful tool for semi-analytic models of galaxy formation and for modelling hierarchical structure formation in general.
The Sheffield Advanced Code (SAC) is a fully non-linear MHD code designed for simulations of linear and non-linear wave propagation in gravitationally strongly stratified magnetized plasma. It was developed primarily for the forward modelling of helioseismological processes and for the coupling processes in the solar interior, photosphere, and corona; it is built on the well-known VAC platform that allows robust simulation of the macroscopic processes in gravitationally stratified (non-)magnetized plasmas. The code has no limitations of simulation length in time imposed by complications originating from the upper boundary, nor does it require implementation of special procedures to treat the upper boundaries. SAC inherited its modular structure from VAC, thereby allowing modification to easily add new physics.
grmonty is a Monte Carlo radiative transport code intended for calculating spectra of hot, optically thin plasmas in full general relativity. The code models hot accretion flows in the Kerr metric, it incorporates synchrotron emission and absorption and Compton scattering. grmonty can be readily generalized to account for other radiative processes and an arbitrary spacetime.
Harmony is a general numerical scheme for evaluating MBS emission and absorption coefficients for both polarized and unpolarized light in a plasma with a general distribution function.
PROM4 computes simple models of solar prominences which consist of plane-parallel slabs standing vertically above the solar surface. Each model is defined by 5 parameters: temperature, density, geometrical thickness, microturbulent velocity and height above the solar surface. PROM4 solves the equations of radiative transfer, statistical equilibrium, ionization and pressure equilibria, and computes electron and hydrogen level populations and hydrogen line profiles. Written in Fortran 90 and with two versions available (one with text in English, one with text in French), the code needs 64-bit arithmetic for real numbers.
PROM7 (ascl:1805.023) is a more recent version of this code.
PROS is a multi-mission x-ray analysis software system designed to run under IRAF. The PROS software includes spatial, spectral, timing, data I/O and conversion routines, plotting applications, and general algorithms for performing arithmetic operations with imaging data.
BEHR is a standalone command-line C program designed to quickly estimate the hardness ratios and their uncertainties for astrophysical sources. It is especially useful in the Poisson regime of low counts, and computes the proper uncertainty regardless of whether the source is detected in both passbands or not.
Tapir is a set of tools, written in Perl, that provides a web interface for showing the observability of periodic astronomical events, such as exoplanet transits or eclipsing binaries. The package provides tools for creating finding charts for each target and airmass plots for each event. The code can access target lists that are stored on-line in a Google spreadsheet or in a local text file.
MAPPINGS III is a general purpose astrophysical plasma modelling code. It is principally intended to predict emission line spectra of medium and low density plasmas subjected to different levels of photoionization and ionization by shockwaves. MAPPINGS III tracks up to 16 atomic species in all stages of ionization, over a useful range of 102 to 108 K. It treats spherical and plane parallel geometries in equilibrium and time-dependent models. MAPPINGS III is useful for computing models of HI and HII regions, planetary nebulae, novae, supernova remnants, Herbig-Haro shocks, active galaxies, the intergalactic medium and the interstellar medium in general. The present version of MAPPINGS III is a large FORTRAN program that runs with a simple TTY interface for historical and portability reasons. A newer version of this software, MAPPINGS V (ascl:1807.005), is available.
STF is a general structure finder designed to find halos, subhaloes, and tidal debris in N-body simulations. The current version is designed to read in "particle data" (that is SPH N-body data), but a simple modification of the I/O can have it read grid data from Grid based codes.
This code has been updated and renamed to VELOCIraptor-STF (ascl:1911.020).
MADCOW is a set of parallelized programs written in ANSI C and Fortran 77 that perform a maximum likelihood analysis of visibility data from interferometers observing the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. This software has been used to produce power spectra of the CMB with the Very Small Array (VSA) telescope.
Pico is an algorithm that quickly computes the CMB scalar, tensor and lensed power spectra, the matter transfer function and the WMAP 5 year likelihood. It is intended to accelerate parameter estimation codes; Pico can compute the CMB power spectrum and matter transfer function, as well as any computationally expensive likelihoods, in a few milliseconds. It is extremely fast and accurate over a large volume of parameter space and its accuracy can be improved by using a larger training set. More generally, Pico allows using massively parallel computing resources, including distributed computing projects such as Cosmology@Home, to speed up the slow steps in inherently sequential calculations.
This software computes likelihoods for the Luminous Red Galaxies (LRG) data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). It includes a patch to the existing CAMB software (ascl:1102.026; the February 2009 release) to calculate the theoretical LRG halo power spectrum for various models. The code is written in Fortran 90 and has been tested with the Intel Fortran 90 and GFortran compilers.
Bessel, written in the C programming language, uses an accurate scheme for evaluating Bessel functions of high order. It has been extensively tested against a number of other routines, demonstrating its accuracy and efficiency.
ZEUS-2D is a hydrodynamics code based on ZEUS which adds a covariant differencing formalism and algorithms for compressible hydrodynamics, MHD, and radiation hydrodynamics (using flux-limited diffusion) in Cartesian, cylindrical, or spherical polar coordinates.
VHD is a numerical study of viscous fluid accretion onto a black hole. The flow is axisymmetric and uses a pseudo-Newtonian potential to model relativistic effects near the event horizon. VHD is based on ZEUS-2D (Stone & Norman 1992) with the addition of an explicit scheme for the viscosity.
Yaxx is a Perl script that facilitates batch data processing using Perl open source software and commonly available software such as CIAO/Sherpa, S-lang, SAS, and FTOOLS. For Chandra and XMM analysis it includes automated spectral extraction, fitting, and report generation. Yaxx can be run without climbing an extensive learning curve; even so, yaxx is highly configurable and can be customized to support complex analysis. yaxx uses template files and takes full advantage of the unique Sherpa / S-lang environment to make much of the processing user configurable. Although originally developed with an emphasis on X-ray data analysis, yaxx evolved to be a general-purpose pipeline scripting package.
DustEM computes the extinction and the emission of interstellar dust grains heated by photons. It is written in Fortran 95 and is jointly developed by IAS and CESR. The dust emission is calculated in the optically thin limit (no radiative transfer) and the default spectral range is 40 to 108 nm. The code is designed so dust properties can easily be changed and mixed and to allow for the inclusion of new grain physics.
Monte Python is a parameter inference code which combines the flexibility of the python language and the robustness of the cosmological code CLASS (ascl:1106.020) into a simple and easy to manipulate Monte Carlo Markov Chain code.
This version has been archived and replaced by MontePython 3 (ascl:1805.027).
K3Match is a C library with Python bindings for fast matching of points in 3D space. It uses an implementation of three dimensional binary trees to efficiently find matches between points in 3D space. Two lists of points are compared and match indices as well as distances are given. K3Match can find either the nearest neighbour or all matches within a given search distance in 3D Cartesian space or on the surface of the 2D unit sphere in standard spherical or celestial coordinates.
FieldInf is a collection of fast modern Fortran routines for computing exactly the background evolution and primordial power spectra of any single field inflationary models. It implements reheating without any assumptions through the "reheating parameter" R allowing robust inflationary parameter estimations and inference on the reheating energy scale. The underlying perturbation code actually deals with N fields minimally-coupled and/or non-minimally coupled to gravity and works for flat FLRW only.
Lensview models resolved gravitational lens systems based on LensMEM but using the Skilling & Bryan MEM algorithm. Though its primary purpose is to find statistically acceptable lens models for lensed images and to reconstruct the surface brightness profile of the source, LENSVIEW can also be used for more simple tasks such as projecting a given source through a lens model to generate a “true” image by conserving surface brightness. The user can specify complicated lens models based on one or more components, such as softened isothermal ellipsoids, point masses, exponential discs, and external shears; LENSVIEW generates a best-fitting source matching the observed data for each specific combination of model parameters.
im2shape is a Bayesian approach to the problem of accurate measurement of galaxy ellipticities for weak lensing studies, in particular cosmic shear. im2shape parameterizes galaxies as sums of Gaussians, convolved with a psf which is also a sum of Gaussians. The uncertainties in the output parameters are calculated using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo approach.
AstroTaverna is a plugin for Taverna Workbench that provides the means to build astronomy workflows using Virtual Observatory services discovery and efficient manipulation of VOTables (based on STIL tool set). It integrates SAMP-enabled software, allowing data exchange and communication among local VO tools, as well as the ability to execute Aladin scripts and macros.
Obit is a group of software packages for handling radio astronomy data, especially interferometric and single dish OTF imaging. Obit is primarily an environment in which new data processing algorithms can be developed and tested but which can also be used for production processing of a certain range of scientific problems. The package supports both prepackaged, compiled tasks and a python interface to the major class functionality to allow rapid prototyping using python scripts; it allows access to multiple disk--resident data formats, in particular access to either AIPS disk data or FITS files. Obit applications are interoperable with Classic AIPS and the ObitTalk python interface gives access to AIPS tasks as well as Obit libraries and tasks.
MAH calculates the posterior distribution of the "minimum atmospheric height" (MAH) of an exoplanet by inputting the joint posterior distribution of the mass and radius. The code collapses the two dimensions of mass and radius into a one dimensional term that most directly speaks to whether the planet has an atmosphere or not. The joint mass-radius posteriors derived from a fit of some exoplanet data (likely using MCMC) can be used by MAH to evaluate the posterior distribution of R_MAH, from which the significance of a non-zero R_MAH (i.e. an atmosphere is present) is calculated.
Cosmoxi2d is written in C and computes the theoretical two-point galaxy correlation function as a function of cosmological and galaxy nuisance parameters. It numerically evaluates the model described in detail in Reid and White 2011 (arxiv:1105.4165) and Reid et al. 2012 (arxiv:1203.6641) for the multipole moments (up to ell = 4) for the observed redshift space correlation function of biased tracers as a function of cosmological (though an input linear matter power spectrum, growth rate f, and Alcock-Paczynski geometric factors alphaperp and alphapar) as well as nuisance parameters describing the tracers (bias and small scale additive velocity dispersion, isotropicdisp1d).
This model works best for highly biased tracers where the 2nd order bias term is small. On scales larger than 100 Mpc, the code relies on 2nd order Lagrangian Perturbation theory as detailed in Matsubara 2008 (PRD 78, 083519), and uses the analytic version of Reid and White 2011 on smaller scales.
The Photon Simulator (PhoSim) is a set of fast photon Monte Carlo codes used to calculate the physics of the atmosphere, telescope, and detector by using modern numerical techniques applied to comprehensive physical models. PhoSim generates images by collecting photons into pixels. The code takes the description of what astronomical objects are in the sky at a particular time (the instance catalog) as well as the description of the observing configuration (the operational parameters) and produces a realistic data stream of images that are similar to what a real telescope would produce. PhoSim was developed for large aperture wide field optical telescopes, such as the planned design of LSST. The initial version of the simulator also targeted the LSST telescope and camera design, but the code has since been broadened to include existing telescopes of a related nature. The atmospheric model, in particular, includes physical approximations that are limited to this general context.
ITERA, the IDL Tool for Emission-line Ratio Analysis, is an IDL widget tool that allows you to plot ratios of any strong atomic and ionized emission lines as determined by standard photoionization and shock models. These "line ratio diagrams" can then be used to determine diagnostics for nebulae excitation mechanisms or nebulae parameters such as density, temperature, metallicity, etc. ITERA can also be used to determine line sensitivities to such parameters, compare observations with the models, or even estimate unobserved line fluxes.
SIMX simulates a photon-counting detector's response to an input source, including a simplified model of any telescope. The code is not a full ray-trace, but a convolution tool that uses standard descriptions of telescope PSF (via either a simple Gaussian parameter, an energy-dependent encircled-energy function, or an image of the PSF) and the detector response (using the OGIP response function) to model how sources will appear. simx uses a predefined set of PSFs, vignetting information, and instrumental responses and outputs to make the simulation. It is designed to be a 'approximation' tool to estimate issues such as source confusion, background effects, pileup, and other similar issues.
Shapelets are a complete, orthonormal set of 2D basis functions constructed from Laguerre or Hermite polynomials weighted by a Gaussian. A linear combination of these functions can be used to model any image, in a similar way to Fourier or wavelet synthesis. The shapelet decomposition is particularly efficient for images localized in space, and provide a high level of compression for individual galaxies in astronomical data. The basis has many elegant mathematical properties that make it convenient for image analysis and processing.
Charge Transfer Inefficiency (CTI) due to radiation damage above the Earth's atmosphere creates spurious trailing in images from Charge-Coupled Device (CCD) imaging detectors. Radiation damage also creates unrelated warm pixels, which can be used to measure CTI. This code provides pixel-based correction for CTI and has proven effective in Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys raw images, successfully reducing the CTI trails by a factor of ~30 everywhere in the CCD and at all flux levels. The core is written in java for speed, and a front-end user interface is provided in IDL. The code operates on raw data by returning individual electrons to pixels from which they were unintentionally dragged during readout. Correction takes about 25 minutes per ACS exposure, but is trivially parallelisable to multiple processors.
Orbfit determines positions and orbital elements, and associated uncertainties, of outer solar system planets. The orbit-fitting procedure is greatly streamlined compared with traditional methods because acceleration can be treated as a perturbation to the inertial motion of the body. Orbfit quickly and accurately calculates orbital elements and ephemerides and their associated uncertainties for targets ≳ 10 AU from the Sun and produces positional estimates and uncertainty ellipses even in the face of the substantial degeneracies of short-arc orbit fits; the sole a priori assumption is that the orbit should be bound or nearly so.
NEST (Noble Element Simulation Technique) offers comprehensive, accurate, and precise simulation of the excitation, ionization, and corresponding scintillation and electroluminescence processes in liquid noble elements, useful for direct dark matter detectors, double beta decay searches, PET scans, and general radiation detection technology. Written in C++, NEST is an add-on module for the Geant4 simulation package that incorporates more detailed physics than is currently available into the simulation of scintillation. NEST is of particular use for low-energy nuclear recoils. All available liquid xenon data on nuclear recoils and electron recoils to date have been taken into consideration in arriving at the current models. NEST also handles the magnitude of the light and charge yields of nuclear recoils, including their electric field dependence, thereby shedding light on the possibility of detection or exclusion of a low-mass dark matter WIMP by liquid xenon detectors.
ETC++ is a exposure-time calculator that considers the effect of cosmic rays, undersampling, dithering, and imperfect pixel response functions. Errors on astrometry and galaxy shape measurements can be predicted as well as photometric errors.
PURIFY is a collection of routines written in C that implements different tools for radio-interferometric imaging including file handling (for both visibilities and fits files), implementation of the measurement operator and set-up of the different optimization problems used for image deconvolution. The code calls the generic Sparse OPTimization (SOPT) (ascl:1307.020) package to solve the imaging optimization problems.
SOPT (Sparse OPTimisation) is a C implementation of the Sparsity Averaging Reweighted Analysis (SARA) algorithm. The approach relies on the observation that natural images exhibit strong average sparsity; average sparsity outperforms state-of-the-art priors that promote sparsity in a single orthonormal basis or redundant frame, or that promote gradient sparsity.
SMILE is interactive software for studying a variety of 2D and 3D models, including arbitrary potentials represented by a basis-set expansion, a spherical-harmonic expansion with coefficients being smooth functions of radius (splines), or a set of fixed point masses. Its main features include:
LOSSCONE computes the rates of capture of stars by supermassive black holes. It uses a stationary and time-dependent solutions for the Fokker-Planck equation describing the evolution of the distribution function of stars due to two-body relaxation, and works for arbitrary spherical and axisymmetric galactic models that are provided by the user in the form of M(r), the cumulative mass as a function of radius.
MapCurvature, written in IDL, can create map projections with Goldberg-Gott indicatrices. These indicatrices measure the flexion and skewness of a map, and are useful for determining whether features are faithfully reproduced on a particular projection.
LensEnt2 is a maximum entropy reconstructor of weak lensing mass maps. The method takes each galaxy shape as an independent estimator of the reduced shear field and incorporates an intrinsic smoothness, determined by Bayesian methods, into the reconstruction. The uncertainties from both the intrinsic distribution of galaxy shapes and galaxy shape estimation are carried through to the final mass reconstruction, and the mass within arbitrarily shaped apertures are calculated with corresponding uncertainties. The input is a galaxy ellipticity catalog with each measured galaxy shape treated as a noisy tracer of the reduced shear field, which is inferred on a fine pixel grid assuming positivity, and smoothness on scales of w arcsec where w is an input parameter. The ICF width w can be chosen by computing the evidence for it.
APPSPACK is serial or parallel, derivative-free optimization software for solving nonlinear unconstrained, bound-constrained, and linearly-constrained optimization problems, with possibly noisy and expensive objective functions.
BASIN (Beowulf Analysis Symbolic INterface) is a flexible, integrated suite of tools for multiuser parallel data analysis and visualization that allows researchers to harness the power of Beowulf PC clusters and multi-processor machines without necessarily being experts in parallel programming. It also includes general tools for data distribution and parallel operations on distributed data for developing libraries for specific tasks.
SYNAPPS is a spectrum fitter embedding a highly parameterized synthetic SN spectrum calculation within a parallel asynchronous optimizer. This open-source code is aimed primarily at the problem of systematically interpreting large sets of SN spectroscopy data.
SYN++ is a standalone SN spectrum synthesis program. It is a rewrite of the original SYNOW (ascl:1010.055) code in modern C++. It offers further enhancements, a new structured input control file format, and the atomic data files have been repackaged and are more complete than those of SYNOW.
CReSyPS (Code Rennais de Synthèse de Populations Stellaires) is a stellar population synthesis code that determines core overshooting amount for Magellanic clouds main sequence stars.
GYRE is an oscillation code that solves the stellar pulsation equations (both adiabatic and non-adiabatic) using a novel Magnus Multiple Shooting numerical scheme devised to overcome certain weaknesses of the usual relaxation and shooting schemes. The code is accurate (up to 6th order in the number of grid points), robust, and makes efficient use of multiple processor cores and/or nodes.
CRUSH is an astronomical data reduction/imaging tool for certain imaging cameras, especially at the millimeter, sub-millimeter, and far-infrared wavelengths. It supports the SHARC-2, LABOCA, SABOCA, ASZCA, p-ArTeMiS, PolKa, GISMO, MAKO and SCUBA-2 instruments. The code is written entirely in Java, allowing it to run on virtually any platform. It is normally run from the command-line with several arguments.
RADLite is a raytracer that is optimized for producing infrared line spectra and images from axisymmetric density structures, originally developed to function on top of the dust radiative transfer code RADMC. RADLite can consistently deal with a wide range of velocity gradients, such as those typical for the inner regions of protoplanetary disks. The code is intended as a back-end for chemical and excitation codes, and can rapidly produce spectra of thousands of lines for grids of models for comparison with observations. It includes functionality for simulating telescopic images for optical/IR/midIR/farIR telescopes. It takes advantage of multi-threaded CPUs and includes an escape-probability non-LTE module.
THELI is an easy-to-use, end-to-end pipeline for the reduction of any optical, near-IR and mid-IR imaging data. It combines a variety of processing algorithms and third party software into a single, homogeneous tool. Over 90 optical and infrared instruments at observatories world-wide are pre-configured; more can be added by the user. The code's online appendix contains three walk-through examples using public data (optical, near-IR and mid-IR) and additional online documentation is available for training and troubleshooting.
SPEX is optimized for the analysis and interpretation of high-resolution cosmic X-ray spectra. The software is especially suited for fitting spectra obtained by current X-ray observatories like XMM-Newton, Chandra, and Suzaku. SPEX can fit multiple spectra with different model components simultaneously and handles highly complex models with many free parameters.
Ceph_code fits multi-band Cepheid light-curves using templates derived from OGLE observations. The templates include short period stars (<10 day) and overtone stars.
JHelioview is open source visualization software for solar physics data. The JHelioviewer client application enables users to browse petabyte-scale image archives; the JHelioviewer server integrates a JPIP server, metadata catalog, and an event server. JHelioview uses the JPEG 2000 image compression standard, which provides efficient access to petabyte-scale image archives; JHelioviewer also allows users to locate and manipulate specific data sets.
ChiantiPy is an object-orient Python package for calculating astrophysical spectra using the CHIANTI atomic database for astrophysical spectroscopy. It provides access to the database and the ability to calculate various physical quantities for the interpretation of astrophysical spectra.
MOOGStokes is a version of the MOOG one-dimensional local thermodynamic equilibrium radiative transfer code that incorporates a Stokes vector treatment of polarized radiation through a magnetic medium. It consists of three complementary programs that together can synthesize the disk-averaged emergent spectrum of a star with a magnetic field. The MOOGStokes package synthesizes emergent spectra of stars with magnetic fields in a familiar computational framework and produces disk-averaged spectra for all Stokes vectors ( I, Q, U, V ), normalized by the continuum.
AstroImageJ is generic ImageJ (ascl:1206.013) with customizations to the base code and a packaged set of astronomy specific plugins. It reads and writes FITS images with standard headers, displays astronomical coordinates for images with WCS, supports photometry for developing color-magnitude data, offers flat field, scaled dark, and non-linearity processing, and includes tools for precision photometry that can be used during real-time data acquisition.
VAPHOT is an aperture photometry package for precise time−series photometry of uncrowded fields, geared towards the extraction of target lightcurves of eclipsing or transiting systems. Its photometric main routine works within the IRAF (ascl:9911.002) environment and is built upon the standard aperture photometry task 'phot' from IRAF, using optimized aperture sizes. The associated analysis program 'VANALIZ' works in the IDL environment. It performs differential photometry with graphical and numerical output. VANALIZ produces plots indicative of photometric stability and permits the interactive evaluation and weighting of comparison stars. Also possible is the automatic or manual suppression of data-points and the output of statistical analyses. Several methods for the calculation of the reference brightness are offered. Specific routines for the analysis of transit 'on'-'off' photometry, comparing the target brightness inside against outside a transit are also available.
LOSP is a FORTRAN77 numerical package that computes the orbital parameters of spectroscopic binaries. The package deals with SB1 and SB2 systems and is able to adjust either circular or eccentric orbits through a weighted fit.
The Spherical Library provides an efficient and accurate mathematical representation of shapes on the celestial sphere, such as sky coverage and footprints. Shapes of arbitrary complexity and size can be dynamically created from simple building blocks, whose exact area is also analytically computed. This methodology is also perfectly suited for censoring problematic parts of datasets, e.g., bad seeing, satellite trails or diffraction spikes of bright stars.
SATMC is a general purpose, MCMC-based SED fitting code written for IDL and Python. Following Bayesian statistics and Monte Carlo Markov Chain algorithms, SATMC derives the best fit parameter values and returns the sampling of parameter space used to construct confidence intervals and parameter-parameter confidence contours. The fitting may cover any range of wavelengths. The code is designed to incorporate any models (and potential priors) of the user's choice. The user guide lists all the relevant details for including observations, models and usage under both IDL and Python.
VOPlot is a tool for visualizing astronomical data. It was developed in Java and acts on data available in VOTABLE, ASCII and FITS formats. VOPlot is available as a stand alone version, which is to be installed on the user's machine, or as a web-based version fully integrated with the VizieR database.
VOMegaPlot, a Java based tool, has been developed for visualizing astronomical data that is available in VOTable format. It has been specifically optimized for handling large number of points (in the range of millions). It has the same look and feel as VOPlot (ascl:1309.006) and both these tools have certain common functionality.
VOStat allows astronomers to use both simple and sophisticated statistical routines on large datasets. This tool uses the large public-domain statistical computing package R. Datasets can be uploaded in either ASCII or VOTABLE (preferred) format. The statistical computations are performed by the VOStat and results are returned to the user.
ORAC-DR is a generic data reduction pipeline infrastructure; it includes specific data processing recipes for a number of instruments. It is used at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, United Kingdom Infrared Telescope, AAT, and LCOGT. This pipeline runs at the JCMT Science Archive hosted by CADC to generate near-publication quality data products; the code has been in use since 1998.
PyMSES provides a python solution for getting data out of RAMSES (ascl:1011.007) astrophysical fluid dynamics simulations. It permits transparent manipulation of large simulations and interfaces with common Python libraries and existing code, and can serve as a post-processing toolbox for data analysis. It also does three-dimensional volume rendering with a specific algorithm optimized to work on RAMSES distributed data (Guillet et al. 2011 and Jones et a. 2011).
AIDA is an implementation and extension of the MISTRAL myopic deconvolution method developed by Mugnier et al. (2004) (see J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 21:1841-1854). The MISTRAL approach has been shown to yield object reconstructions with excellent edge preservation and photometric precision when used to process astronomical images. AIDA improves upon the original MISTRAL implementation. AIDA, written in Python, can deconvolve multiple frame data and three-dimensional image stacks encountered in adaptive optics and light microscopic imaging.
AIRY simulates optical and near-infrared interferometric observations; it can also perform subsequent image restoration or deconvolution. It is based on the CAOS (ascl:1106.017) Problem Solving Environment. Written in IDL, it consists of a set of specific modules, each handling a particular task.
ASPRO 2 (Astronomical Software to PRepare Observations) is an observation preparation tool for interferometric observations with the VLTI or other interferometers such as CHARA and SUSI. It is a Java standalone program that provides a dynamic graphical interface to simulate the projected baseline evolution during observations (super-synthesis) and derive visibilities for targets (i.e., single star, binaries, user defined FITS image). It offers other useful functions such as the ability to load and save your observation settings and generate Observing Blocks.
AIPSLite is an extension for ParselTongue (ascl:1208.020) that allows machines without an AIPS (ascl:9911.003) distribution to bootstrap themselves with a minimal AIPS environment. This allows deployment of AIPS routines on distributed systems, which is useful when data can be easily be split into smaller chunks and handled independently.
SMURF reduces submillimeter single-dish continuum and heterodyne data. It is mainly targeted at data produced by the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope but data from other telescopes have been reduced using the package. SMURF is released as part of the bundle that comprises Starlink (ascl:1110.012) and most of the packages that use it. The two key commands are MAKEMAP for the creation of maps from sub millimeter continuum data and MAKECUBE for the creation of data cubes from heterodyne array instruments. The software can also convert data from legacy JCMT file formats to the modern form to allow it to be processed by MAKECUBE. SMURF is a core component of the ORAC-DR (ascl:1310.001) data reduction pipeline for JCMT.
SPECX is a general purpose line data reduction system. It can read and write FITS data cubes but has specialist support for the GSD format data from the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope. It includes commands to store and retrieve intermediate spectra in storage registers and perform the fitting and removal of polynomial, harmonic and Gaussian baselines.
SPECX can filter and edit spectra and list and display spectra on a graphics terminal. It is able to perform Fourier transform and power spectrum calculations, process up to eight spectra (quadrants) simultaneously with either the same or different center, and assemble a number of reduced individual spectra into a map file and contour or greyscale any plane or planes of the resulting cube.
Two versions of SPECX are distributed. Version 6.x is the VMS and Unix version and is distributed as part of the Starlink software collection. Version 7.x is a complete rewrite of SPECX distributed for Windows.
SciDB is a DMAS (Data Management and Analytics Software System) optimized for data management of big data and for big analytics. SciDB is organized around multidimensional array storage, a generalization of relational tables, and is designed to be scalable up to petabytes and beyond. Complex analytics are simplified with SciDB because arrays and vectors are first-class objects with built-in optimized operations. Spatial operators and time-series analysis are easy to express. Interfaces to common scientific tools like R as well as programming languages like C++ and Python are provided.
PyCOOL is a Python + CUDA program that solves the evolution of interacting scalar fields in an expanding universe. PyCOOL uses modern GPUs to solve this evolution and to make the computation much faster. The code includes numerous post-processing functions that provide useful information about the cosmological model, including various spectra and statistics of the fields.
ASCII tables continue to be one of the most popular and widely used data exchange formats in astronomy. AstroAsciiData, written in Python, imports all reasonably well-formed ASCII tables. It retains formatting of data values, allows column-first access, supports SExtractor style headings, performs column sorting, and exports data to other formats, including FITS, Numpy/Numarray, and LaTeX table format. It also offers interchangeable comment character, column delimiter and null value.
PlanetPack facilitates and standardizes the advanced analysis of radial velocity (RV) data for the goal of exoplanets detection, characterization, and basic dynamical N-body simulations. PlanetPack is a command-line interpreter that can run either in an interactive mode or in a batch mode of automatic script interpretation.
Spheroid determines the size distribution of polarizing interstellar dust grains based on electromagnetic scattering by spheroidal particles. It contains subroutines to treat the case of complex refractive indices, and also includes checks for some limiting cases.
CIAO is a data analysis system written for the needs of users of the Chandra X-ray Observatory. Because Chandra data is 4-dimensional (2 spatial, time, energy) and each dimension has many independent elements, CIAO was built to handle N-dimensional data without concern about which particular axes were being analyzed. Apart from a few Chandra instrument tools, CIAO is mission independent. CIAO tools read and write several formats, including FITS images and tables (which includes event files) and IRAF imh files. CIAO is a powerful system for the analysis of many types of data.
The CUPID package allows the identification and analysis of clumps of emission within 1, 2 or 3 dimensional data arrays. Whilst targeted primarily at sub-mm cubes, it can be used on any regularly gridded 1, 2 or 3D data. A variety of clump finding algorithms are implemented within CUPID, including the established ClumpFind (ascl:1107.014) and GAUSSCLUMPS (ascl:1406.018) algorithms. In addition, two new algorithms called FellWalker and Reinhold are also provided. CUPID allows easy inter-comparison between the results of different algorithms; the catalogues produced by each algorithm contains a standard set of columns containing clump peak position, clump centroid position, the integrated data value within the clump, clump volume, and the dimensions of the clump. In addition, pixel masks are produced identifying which input pixels contribute to each clump. CUPID is distributed as part of the Starlink (ascl:1110.012) software collection.
Written in c, the Customizable User Pipeline for IRS Data (CUPID) allows users to run the Spitzer IRS Pipelines to re-create Basic Calibrated Data and extract calibrated spectra from the archived raw files. CUPID provides full access to all the parameters of the BCD, COADD, BKSUB, BKSUBX, and COADDX pipelines, as well as the opportunity for users to provide their own calibration files (e.g., flats or darks). CUPID is available for Mac, Linux, and Solaris operating systems.
CosmoTherm allows precise computation of CMB spectral distortions caused by energy release in the early Universe. Different energy-release scenarios (e.g., decaying or annihilating particles) are implemented using the Green's function of the cosmological thermalization problem, allowing fast computation of the distortion signal. The full thermalization problem can be solved on a case-by-case basis for a wide range of energy-release scenarios using the full PDE solver of CosmoTherm. A simple Monte-Carlo toolkit is included for parameter estimation and forecasts using the Green's function method.
ARPACK is a collection of Fortran77 subroutines designed to solve large scale eigenvalue problems. The package is designed to compute a few eigenvalues and corresponding eigenvectors of a general n by n matrix A. It is most appropriate for large sparse or structured matrices A where structured means that a matrix-vector product w <- Av requires order n rather than the usual order n2 floating point operations. This software is based upon an algorithmic variant of the Arnoldi process called the Implicitly Restarted Arnoldi Method (IRAM). When the matrix A is symmetric it reduces to a variant of the Lanczos process called the Implicitly Restarted Lanczos Method (IRLM). These variants may be viewed as a synthesis of the Arnoldi/Lanczos process with the Implicitly Shifted QR technique that is suitable for large scale problems. For many standard problems, a matrix factorization is not required; only the action of the matrix on a vector is needed. ARPACK is capable of solving large scale symmetric, nonsymmetric, and generalized eigenproblems from significant application areas.
A common community-maintained repository for this software, ARPACK-NG (ascl:2306.049), is available.
MUSIC generates multi-scale initial conditions with multiple levels of refinements for cosmological ‘zoom-in’ simulations. The code uses an adaptive convolution of Gaussian white noise with a real-space transfer function kernel together with an adaptive multi-grid Poisson solver to generate displacements and velocities following first- (1LPT) or second-order Lagrangian perturbation theory (2LPT). MUSIC achieves rms relative errors of the order of 10−4 for displacements and velocities in the refinement region and thus improves in terms of errors by about two orders of magnitude over previous approaches. In addition, errors are localized at coarse-fine boundaries and do not suffer from Fourier space-induced interference ringing.
Written for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) high-latitude survey, the exposure time calculator (ETC) works in both imaging and spectroscopic modes. In addition to the standard ETC functions (e.g. background and S/N determination), the calculator integrates over the galaxy population and forecasts the density and redshift distribution of galaxy shapes usable for weak lensing (in imaging mode) and the detected emission lines (in spectroscopic mode). The program may be useful outside of WFIRST but no warranties are made regarding its suitability for general purposes. The software is available for download; IPAC maintains a web interface for those who wish to run a small number of cases without having to download the package.
SERPent is an automated reduction and RFI-mitigation procedure that uses the SumThreshold methodology. It was originally developed for the LOFAR pipeline. SERPent is written in Parseltongue, enabling interaction with the Astronomical Image Processing Software (AIPS) program. Moreover, SERPent is a simple "out of the box" Python script, which is easy to set up and is free of compilers.
WND-CHARM quantitatively analyzes morphologies of galaxy mergers and associate galaxies by their morphology. It computes a large set (up to ~2700) of image features for each image based on the WND-CHARM algorithm. It can then split the images into training and test sets and classify them. The software extracts the image content descriptor from raw images, image transforms, and compound image transforms. The most informative features are then selected, and the feature vector of each image is used for classification and similarity measurement using Fisher discriminant scores and a variation of Weighted Nearest Neighbor analysis. WND-CHARM's results comparable favorably to the performance of task-specific algorithms developed for tested datasets. The simple user interface allows researchers who are not knowledgeable in computer vision methods and have no background in computer programming to apply image analysis to their data.
IMCOM allows for careful treatment of aliasing in undersampled imaging data and can be used to test the feasibility of multi-exposure observing strategies for space-based survey missions. IMCOM can also been used to explore focal plane undersampling for an optical space mission such as Euclid.
The Bayesian Inference Engine (BIE) is an object-oriented library of tools written in C++ designed explicitly to enable Bayesian update and model comparison for astronomical problems. To facilitate "what if" exploration, BIE provides a command line interface (written with Bison and Flex) to run input scripts. The output of the code is a simulation of the Bayesian posterior distribution from which summary statistics e.g. by taking moments, or determine confidence intervals and so forth, can be determined. All of these quantities are fundamentally integrals and the Markov Chain approach produces variates $ heta$ distributed according to $P( heta|D)$ so moments are trivially obtained by summing of the ensemble of variates.
XAssist provides automation of X-ray astrophysics, specifically data reprocessing, source detection, and preliminary spatial, temporal and spectral analysis for each source with sufficient counts, with an emphasis on galaxies. It has been used for data from Chandra, ROSAT, XMM-Newton, and other various projects.
LTL provides dynamic arrays of up to 7-dimensions, subarrays and slicing, support for fixed-size vectors and matrices including basic linear algebra operations, expression templates-based evaluation, and I/O facilities for ascii and FITS format files. Utility classes for command-line processing and configuration-file processing are provided as well.
SkyNet is an efficient and robust neural network training code for machine learning. It is able to train large and deep feed-forward neural networks, including autoencoders, for use in a wide range of supervised and unsupervised learning applications, such as regression, classification, density estimation, clustering and dimensionality reduction. SkyNet is implemented in C/C++ and fully parallelized using MPI.
BAMBI (Blind Accelerated Multimodal Bayesian Inference) is a Bayesian inference engine that combines the benefits of SkyNet (ascl:1312.007) with MultiNest (ascl:1109.006). It operated by simultaneously performing Bayesian inference using MultiNest and learning the likelihood function using SkyNet. Once SkyNet has learnt the likelihood to sufficient accuracy, inference finishes almost instantaneously.
YODA, implemented in C++, performs object detection, photometry and star-galaxy classification on astronomical images. Developed specifically to cope with the multi-band imaging data common in modern extragalactic imaging surveys, it is modular and therefore easily adaptable to specific needs. YODA works under conditions of inhomogeneous background noise across the detection frame, and performs accurate aperture photometry in image sets not sharing a common coordinate system or pixel scale as is often the case in present-day extragalactic survey work.
GalaxyCount calculates the number and standard deviation of galaxies in a magnitude limited observation of a given area. The methods to calculate both the number and standard deviation may be selected from different options. Variances may be computed for circular, elliptical and rectangular window functions.
Photon asymmetry is a novel robust substructure statistic for X-ray cluster observations with only a few thousand counts; it exhibits better stability than power ratios and centroid shifts and has a smaller statistical uncertainty than competing substructure parameters, allowing for low levels of substructure to be measured with confidence. A_phot computes the photon asymmetry (A_phot) parameter for morphological classification of clusters and allows quantifying substructure in samples of distant clusters covering a wide range of observational signal-to-noise ratios. The python scripts are completely automatic and can be used to rapidly classify galaxy cluster morphology for large numbers of clusters without human intervention.
The BI-spectra and Non-Gaussianity Operator (BINGO) code, written in Fortran, computes the scalar bi-spectrum and the non-Gaussianity parameter fNL in single field inflationary models involving the canonical scalar field. BINGO can calculate all the different contributions to the bi-spectrum and the parameter fNL for an arbitrary triangular configuration of the wavevectors.
CJAM calculates first and second velocity moments using the Jeans Anisotropic MGE (JAM) models of Cappellari (2008) and Cappellari (2012). These models have been extended to calculate all three (x, y, z) first moments and all six (xx, yy, zz, xy, xz, yz) second moments. CJAM, written in C, is based on the IDL implementation of the line-of-sight calculations by Michele Cappellari.
SL1M deconvolves radio synthesis images based on direct inversion of the measured visibilities that can deal with the non-coplanar base line effect and can be applied to telescopes with direction dependent gains. The code is more computationally demanding than some existing methods, but is highly parallelizable and scale well to clusters of CPUs and GPUs. The algorithm is also extremely flexible, allowing the solution of the deconvolution problem on arbitrarily placed pixels.
The use of graphics processing units offers an attractive alternative to specialized hardware, like GRAPE. The Kirin library mimics the behavior of the GRAPE hardware and uses the GPU to execute the force calculations. It is compatible with the GRAPE6 library; existing code that uses the GRAPE6 library can be recompiled and relinked to use the GPU equivalents of the GRAPE6 functions. All functions in the GRAPE6 library have an equivalent GPU implementation. Kirin can be used for direct N-body simulations as well as for treecodes; it can be run with shared-time steps or with block time-steps and allows non-softened potentials. As Kirin makes use of CUDA, it works only on NVIDIA GPUs.
SpacePy provides data analysis and visualization tools for the space science community. Written in Python, it builds on the capabilities of the NumPy and MatPlotLib packages to make basic data analysis, modeling and visualization easier. It contains modules for handling many complex time formats, obtaining data from the OMNI database, and accessing the powerful Onera library. It contains a library of commonly used empirical relationships, performs association analysis, coordinate transformations, radiation belt modeling, and CDF reading, and creates publication quality plots.
PyMidas is an interface between Python and MIDAS, the major ESO legacy general purpose data processing system. PyMidas allows a user to exploit both the rich legacy of MIDAS software and the power of Python scripting in a unified interactive environment. PyMidas also allows the usage of other Python-based astronomical analysis systems such as PyRAF.
Reflex provides an easy and flexible way to reduce VLT/VLTI science data using the ESO pipelines. It allows graphically specifying the sequence in which the data reduction steps are executed, including conditional stops, loops and conditional branches. It eases inspection of the intermediate and final data products and allows repetition of selected processing steps to optimize the data reduction. The data organization necessary to reduce the data is built into the system and is fully automatic; advanced users can plug their own modules and steps into the data reduction sequence. Reflex supports the development of data reduction workflows based on the ESO Common Pipeline Library. Reflex is based on the concept of a scientific workflow, whereby the data reduction cascade is rendered graphically and data seamlessly flow from one processing step to the next. It is distributed with a number of complete test datasets so users can immediately start experimenting and familiarize themselves with the system.
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