MESS is a Monte Carlo simulation IDL code which uses either the results of the statistical analysis of the properties of discovered planets, or the results of the planet formation theories, to build synthetic planet populations fully described in terms of frequency, orbital elements and physical properties. They can then be used to either test the consistency of their properties with the observed population of planets given different detection techniques or to actually predict the expected number of planets for future surveys. It can be used to probe the physical and orbital properties of a putative companion within the circumstellar disk of a given star and to test constrain the orbital distribution properties of a potential planet population around the members of the TW Hydrae association. Finally, using in its predictive mode, the synergy of future space and ground-based telescopes instrumentation has been investigated to identify the mass-period parameter space that will be probed in future surveys for giant and rocky planets. A Python version of this code, Exo-DMC (ascl:2010.008), is available.

Database management is an increasingly important part of astronomical data analysis. Astronomers need easy and convenient ways of storing, editing, filtering, and retrieving data about data. Commercial databases do not provide good solutions for many of the everyday and informal types of database access astronomers need. The Starbase database system with simple data file formatting rules and command line data operators has been created to answer this need. The system includes a complete set of relational and set operators, fast search/index and sorting operators, and many formatting and I/O operators. Special features are included to enhance the usefulness of the database when manipulating astronomical data. The software runs under UNIX, MSDOS and IRAF.

High precision cosmology requires analysis of large scale surveys in 3D spherical coordinates, i.e. Fourier-Bessel decomposition. Current methods are insufficient for future data-sets from wide-field cosmology surveys. 3DEX (3D EXpansions) is a public code for fast Fourier-Bessel decomposition of 3D all-sky surveys which takes advantage of HEALPix for the calculation of tangential modes. For surveys with millions of galaxies, computation time is reduced by a factor 4-12 depending on the desired scales and accuracy. The formulation is also suitable for pre-calculations and external storage of the spherical harmonics, which allows for further speed improvements. The 3DEX code can accommodate data with masked regions of missing data. It can be applied not only to cosmological data, but also to 3D data in spherical coordinates in other scientific fields.

VAPOR is the Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers. VAPOR provides an interactive 3D visualization environment that runs on most UNIX and Windows systems equipped with modern 3D graphics cards. VAPOR provides:

- A visual data discovery environment tailored towards the specialized needs of the astro and geosciences CFD community
- A desktop solution capable of handling terascale size data sets
- Advanced interactive 3D visualization tightly coupled with quantitative data analysis
- Support for multi-variate, time-varying data
- Close coupling with RSI's powerful interpretive data language, IDL
- Support for 3D visualization of WRF-ARW datasets

The FIBRE-pac (FMOS image-based reduction package) is an IRAF-based reduction tool for the fiber multiple-object spectrograph (FMOS) of the Subaru telescope. To reduce FMOS images, a number of special techniques are necessary because each image contains about 200 separate spectra with airglow emission lines variable in spatial and time domains, and with complicated throughput patterns for the airglow masks. In spite of these features, almost all of the reduction processes except for a few steps are carried out automatically by scripts in text format making it easy to check the commands step by step. Wavelength- and flux-calibrated images together with their noise maps are obtained using this reduction package.

FITSH provides a standalone environment for analysis of data acquired by imaging astronomical detectors. The package provides utilities both for the full pipeline of subsequent related data processing steps (including image calibration, astrometry, source identification, photometry, differential analysis, low-level arithmetic operations, multiple image combinations, spatial transformations and interpolations, etc.) and for aiding the interpretation of the (mainly photometric and/or astrometric) results. The package also features a consistent implementation of photometry based on image subtraction, point spread function fitting and aperture photometry and provides easy-to-use interfaces for comparisons and for picking the most suitable method for a particular problem. The utilities in the package are built on the top of the commonly used UNIX/POSIX shells (hence the name of the package), therefore both frequently used and well-documented tools for such environments can be exploited and managing massive amount of data is rather convenient.

The development of TIPSY was motivated by the need to quickly display and analyze the results of N-body simulations. Most data visualization packages are designed for the display of gridded data, and hence are unsuitable for use with particle data. Therefore, a special package was built that could easily perform the following functions:
1.) Display particle positions (as points), and velocities (as line segments) from an arbitrary viewpoint;
2.) Zoom in to a chosen position. Due to their extremely clustered nature, structure of interest in an N-body simulation is often so small that it cannot be seen when looking at the simulation as a whole;
3.) Color particles to display scalar fields. Examples of such fields are potential energy, or for SPH particles, density and temperature;
4.) Selection of a subset of the particles for display and analysis. Regions of interest are generally small subsets of the simulation;
5.) Following selected particles from one timestep to another; and,
6.) Finding cumulative properties of a collection of particles. This usually involves just a sum over the particles.

The basic data structure is an array of particle structures. Since TIPSY was built for use with cosmological N-body simulations, there are actually three separate arrays for each of the types of particle used in such simulations: collisionless particles, SPH particles, and star particles. A single timestep is read into these arrays from a disk file. Display is done by finding the x and y coordinates of the particles in the rotated coordinate system, and storing them in arrays. Screen coordinates are calculated from these arrays according to the current zoom factor. Also, a software Z-buffer is maintained to save time if many particles project to the same screen pixel. There are several types of display. An "all plot" displays all particles colored according to their type. A "radial plot" will color particles according to the projection of the velocity along the line-of-sight. A "gas plot" will color gas according to SPH quantities such as density, temperature, neutral hydrogen fraction, etc. Subsets of particles are maintained using boxes." A box structure contains a bounding box, and an array of pointers to particles within the box. All display and analysis functions are performed on the "active box." By default all particles are loaded into box 0, which becomes the active box. If a new timestep is read from disk, all boxes are destroyed. A selection of particles can be followed between timesteps via a "mark" array. Marked particles are displayed in a different color, and the analysis functions can be told to only operate on the marked particles.

This code contains several simple radiative transfer models used for fitting the blue-asymmetric spectral line signature often found in infalling molecular cloud cores. It attempts to provide a direct measure of several physical parameters of the infalling core, including infall velocity, excitation temperature, and line of site optical depth. The code includes 6 radiative transfer models, however the conclusion of the associated paper is that the 5 parameter "hill" model (hill5) is most likely the best match to the physical excitation conditions of real infalling Bonnor-Ebert type clouds.

DarkSUSY, written in Fortran, is a publicly-available advanced numerical package for neutralino dark matter calculations. In DarkSUSY one can compute the neutralino density in the Universe today using precision methods which include resonances, pair production thresholds and coannihilations. Masses and mixings of supersymmetric particles can be computed within DarkSUSY or with the help of external programs such as FeynHiggs, ISASUGRA and SUSPECT. Accelerator bounds can be checked to identify viable dark matter candidates. DarkSUSY also computes a large variety of astrophysical signals from neutralino dark matter, such as direct detection in low-background counting experiments and indirect detection through antiprotons, antideuterons, gamma-rays and positrons from the Galactic halo or high-energy neutrinos from the center of the Earth or of the Sun.

The iGalFit suite of IDL routines interactively runs GALFIT whereby the various surface brightness profiles (and their associated parameters) are represented by regions, which the user is expected to place. The regions may be saved and/or loaded from the ASCII format used by ds9 or in the Hierarchical Data Format (version 5). The software has been tested to run stably on Mac OS X and Linux with IDL 7.0.4. In addition to its primary purpose of modeling galaxy images with GALFIT, this package has several ancillary uses, including a flexible image display routines, several basic photometry functions, and qualitatively assessing Source Extractor.

SHTOOLS performs (among others) spherical harmonic transforms and reconstructions, rotations of spherical harmonic coefficients, and multitaper spectral analyses on the sphere. The package accommodates any standard normalization of the spherical harmonic functions ("geodesy" 4π normalized, Schmidt semi-normalized, orthonormalized, and unnormalized), and either real or complex spherical harmonics can be employed. Spherical harmonic transforms are calculated by exact quadrature rules using either (1) the sampling theorem of Driscoll and Healy (1994) where data are equally sampled (or spaced) in latitude and longitude, or (2) Gauss-Legendre quadrature. A least squares inversion routine for irregularly sampled data is included as well. The Condon-Shortley phase factor of (-1)m can be used or excluded with the associated Legendre functions. The spherical harmonic transforms are accurate to approximately degree 2800, corresponding to a spatial resolution of better than 4 arc minutes. Routines are included for performing localized multitaper spectral analyses and standard gravity calculations, such as computation of the geoid, and the determination of the potential associated with finite-amplitude topography. The routines are fast. Spherical harmonic transforms and reconstructions take on the order of 1 second for bandwidths less than 600 and about 3 minutes for bandwidths close to 2800.

The current version of the Zurich Extragalactic Bayesian Redshift Analyzer (ZEBRA) combines and extends several of the classical approaches to produce accurate photometric redshifts down to faint magnitudes. In particular, ZEBRA uses the template-fitting approach to produce Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian redshift estimates based on: (1.) An automatic iterative technique to correct the original set of galaxy templates to best represent the SEDs of real galaxies at different redshifts; (2.) A training set of spectroscopic redshifts for a small fraction of the photometric sample; and (3.) An iterative technique for Bayesian redshift estimates, which extracts the full two-dimensional redshift and template probability function for each galaxy.

STIFF converts scientific FITS images to the more popular TIFF format for illustration purposes. Most FITS readers and converters do not do a proper job at converting FITS image data to 8 bits. 8-bit images stored in JPEG, PNG or TIFF files have the intensities implicitly stored in a non-linear way. Most current FITS image viewers and converters provide the user an incorrect translation of the FITS image content by simply rescaling linearly input pixel values. A first consequence is that the people working on astronomical images usually have to apply narrow intensity cuts or square-root or logarithmic intensity transformations to actually see something on their deep-sky images. A less obvious consequence is that colors obtained by combining images processed this way are not consistent across such a large range of surface brightnesses. Though with other software the user is generally afforded a choice of nonlinear transformations to apply in order to make the faint stuff stand out more clearly in the images, with the limited selection of choices provides, colors will not be accurately rendered, and some manual tweaking will be necessary. The purpose of STIFF is to produce beautiful pictures in an automatic and consistent way.

The GammaLib is a versatile toolbox for the high-level analysis of astronomical gamma-ray data. It is implemented as a C++ library that is fully scriptable in the Python scripting language. The library provides core functionalities such as data input and output, interfaces for parameter specifications, and a reporting and logging interface. It implements instruments specific functionalities such as instrument response functions and data formats. Instrument specific functionalities share a common interface to allow for extension of the GammaLib to include new gamma-ray instruments. The GammaLib provides an abstract data analysis framework that enables simultaneous multi-mission analysis.

Glnemo2 is an interactive 3D visualization program developed in C++ using the OpenGL library and Nokia QT 4.X API. It displays in 3D the particles positions of the different components of an nbody snapshot. It quickly gives a lot of information about the data (shape, density area, formation of structures such as spirals, bars, or peanuts). It allows for in/out zooms, rotations, changes of scale, translations, selection of different groups of particles and plots in different blending colors. It can color particles according to their density or temperature, play with the density threshold, trace orbits, display different time steps, take automatic screenshots to make movies, select particles using the mouse, and fly over a simulation using a given camera path. All these features are accessible from a very intuitive graphic user interface.

Glnemo2 supports a wide range of input file formats (Nemo, Gadget 1 and 2, phiGrape, Ramses, list of files, realtime gyrfalcON simulation) which are automatically detected at loading time without user intervention. Glnemo2 uses a plugin mechanism to load the data, so that it is easy to add a new file reader. It's powered by a 3D engine which uses the latest OpenGL technology, such as shaders (glsl), vertex buffer object, frame buffer object, and takes in account the power of the graphic card used in order to accelerate the rendering. With a fast GPU, millions of particles can be rendered in real time. Glnemo2 runs on Linux, Windows (using minGW compiler), and MaxOSX, thanks to the QT4API.

AAOGlimpse is an experimental display program that uses OpenGL to display FITS data (and even JPEG images) as 3D surfaces that can be rotated and viewed from different angles, all in real-time. It is WCS-compliant and designed to handle three-dimensional data. Each plane in a data cube is surfaced in the same way, and the program allows the user to travel through a cube by 'peeling off' successive planes, or to look into a cube by suppressing the display of data below a given cutoff value. It can blink images and can superimpose images and contour maps from different sources using their world coordinate data. A limited socket interface allows communication with other programs.

MOCASSIN is a fully 3D or 2D photoionisation and dust radiative transfer code which employs a Monte Carlo approach to the transfer of radiation through media of arbitrary geometry and density distribution. Written in Fortran, it was originally developed for the modelling of photoionised regions like HII regions and planetary nebulae and has since expanded and been applied to a variety of astrophysical problems, including modelling clumpy dusty supernova envelopes, star forming galaxies, protoplanetary disks and inner shell fluorence emission in the photospheres of stars and disk atmospheres. The code can deal with arbitrary Cartesian grids of variable resolution, it has successfully been used to model complex density fields from SPH calculations and can deal with ionising radiation extending from Lyman edge to the X-ray. The dust and gas microphysics is fully coupled both in the radiation transfer and in the thermal balance.

Pacerman, written in IDL, is a new method to calculate Faraday rotation measure maps from multi-frequency polarisation angle data. In order to solve the so called n-pi-ambiguity problem which arises from the observationally ambiguity of the polarisation angle which is only determined up to additions of n times pi, where n is an integer, we suggest using a global scheme. Instead of solving the n-pi-ambiguity for each data point independently, our algorithm, which we chose to call Pacerman solves the n-pi-ambiguity for a high signal-to-noise region "democratically" and uses this information to assist computations in adjacent low signal-to-noise areas.

Starlink has many applications within it to meet a variety of needs; it includes:

• a general astronomical image viewer;
• data reduction tools, including programs for reducing CCD-like data;
• general-purpose data-analysis and visualisation tools;
• image processing, data visualisation, and manipulating NDF components;
• a flexible and powerful library for handling World Coordinate Systems (partly based on the SLALIB library);
• a library of routines intended to make accurate and reliable positional-astronomy applications easier to write; and
• and a Hierarchical Data System that is portable and flexible for storing and retrieving data.

Many problems in astronomy and astrophysics require a computation of the spherical harmonic transforms. This is in particular the case whenever data to be analyzed are distributed over the sphere or a set of corresponding mock data sets has to be generated. In many of those contexts, rapidly improving resolutions of both the data and simulations puts increasingly bigger emphasis on our ability to calculate the transforms quickly and reliably.

The scalable spherical harmonic transform library S2HAT consists of a set of flexible, massively parallel, and scalable routines for calculating diverse (scalar, spin-weighted, etc) spherical harmonic transforms for a class of isolatitude sky grids or pixelizations. The library routines implement the standard algorithm with the complexity of O(n^3/2), where n is a number of pixels/grid points on the sphere, however, owing to their efficient parallelization and advanced numerical implementation, they achieve very competitive performance and near perfect scalability. S2HAT is written in Fortran 90 with a C interface. This software is a derivative of the spherical harmonic transforms included in the HEALPix package and is based on both serial and MPI routines of its version 2.01, however, since version 2.5 this software is fully autonomous of HEALPix and can be compiled and run without the HEALPix library.

The pS2HAT routines allow efficient, parallel calculation of the so-called 'pure' polarized multipoles. The computed multipole coefficients are equal to the standard pseudo-multipoles calculated for the apodized sky maps of the Stokes parameters Q and U subsequently corrected by so-called counterterms. If the applied apodizations fullfill certain boundary conditions, these multipoles correspond to the pure multipoles. Pure multipoles of one type, i.e., either E or B, are ensured not to contain contributions from the other one, at least to within numerical artifacts. They can be therefore further used in the estimation of the sky power spectra via the pseudo power spectrum technique, which has to however correctly account for the applied apodization on the one hand, and the presence of the counterterms, on the other.

In addition, the package contains the routines permitting calculation of the spin-weighted apodizations, given an input scalar, i.e., spin-0 window. The former are needed to compute the counterterms. It also provides routines for maps and window manipulations. The routines are written in C and based on the S2HAT library, which is used to perform all required spherical harmonic transforms as well as all inter-processor communication. They are therefore parallelized using MPI and follow the distributed-memory computational model. The data distribution patterns, pixelization choices, conventions etc are all as those assumed/allowed by the S2HAT library.

atlant is a public numerical code for fast calculations of cosmological recombination of primordial hydrogen-helium plasma is presented. This code is based on the three-level approximation (TLA) model of recombination and allows us to take into account some "fine'' physical effects of cosmological recombination simultaneously with using fudge factors.

REBOUND is a multi-purpose N-body code which is freely available under an open-source license. It was designed for collisional dynamics such as planetary rings but can also solve the classical N-body problem. It is highly modular and can be customized easily to work on a wide variety of different problems in astrophysics and beyond.

REBOUND comes with symplectic integrators WHFast, WHFastHelio, SEI, and LEAPFROG. It supports open, periodic and shearing-sheet boundary conditions. REBOUND can use a Barnes-Hut tree to calculate both self-gravity and collisions. These modules are fully parallelized with MPI as well as OpenMP. The former makes use of a static domain decomposition and a distributed essential tree. Two new collision detection modules based on a plane-sweep algorithm are also implemented. The performance of the plane-sweep algorithm is superior to a tree code for simulations in which one dimension is much longer than the other two and in simulations which are quasi-two dimensional with less than one million particles.

POWMES is a F90 program to measure very accurately the power spectrum in a N-body simulation, using Taylor expansion of some order on the cosine and sine transforms. It can read GADGET format and requires FFTW2 to be installed.

MADmap produces maximum-likelihood images of the sky from time-ordered data which include correlated noise, such as those gathered by Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments. It works efficiently on platforms ranging from small workstations to the most massively parallel supercomputers. Map-making is a critical step in the analysis of all CMB data sets, and the maximum-likelihood approach is the most accurate and widely applicable algorithm; however, it is a computationally challenging task. This challenge will only increase with the next generation of ground-based, balloon-borne and satellite CMB polarization experiments. The faintness of the B-mode signal that these experiments seek to measure requires them to gather enormous data sets. MADmap has the ability to address problems typically encountered in the analysis of realistic CMB data sets. The massively parallel and distributed implementation is detailed and scaling complexities are given for the resources required. MADmap is capable of analyzing the largest data sets now being collected on computing resources currently available.

CosmoNest is an algorithm for cosmological model selection. Given a model, defined by a set of parameters to be varied and their prior ranges, and data, the algorithm computes the evidence (the marginalized likelihood of the model in light of the data). The Bayes factor, which is proportional to the relative evidence of two models, can then be used for model comparison, i.e. to decide whether a model is an adequate description of data, or whether the data require a more complex model.

For convenience, CosmoNest, programmed in Fortran, is presented here as an optional add-on to CosmoMC (ascl:1106.025), which is widely used by the cosmological community to perform parameter fitting within a model using a Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo (MCMC) engine. For this reason it can be run very easily by anyone who is able to compile and run CosmoMC. CosmoNest implements a different sampling strategy, geared for computing the evidence very accurately and efficiently. It also provides posteriors for parameter fitting as a by-product.

This code is an extension of CMBFAST4.5.1 to compute the ISW-correlation power spectrum and the 2-point angular ISW-correlation function for a given galaxy window function. It includes dark energy models specified by a constant equation of state (w) or a linear parameterization in the scale factor (w0,wa) and a constant sound speed (c2de). The ISW computation is limited to flat geometry. Differently from the original CMBFAST4.5 version dark energy perturbations are implemented for a general dark energy fluid specified by w(z) and c2de in synchronous gauge. For time varying dark energy models it is suggested not to cross the w=-1 line, as Dr. Wenkman says: "never cross the streams", bad things can happen.

Univiewer is a visualisation program for HEALPix maps. It is written in C++ and uses OpenGL and the wxWidgets library for cross-platform portability. Using it you can:

- Rotate and zoom maps on the sphere in 3D
- Create high-resolution views of square patches of the map
- Change maximum and minimum values of the colourmap interactively
- Calculate the power spectrum of the full-sky map or a patch
- Display any column of a HEALPix map FITS file on the sphere

Since Univiewer uses OpenGL for 3D graphics, its performance is dependent your video card. It has been tested successfully on computers with as little as 8Mb video memory, but it is recommended to have at least 32Mb to get good performance.

In the 3D view, a HEALPix map is projected onto a ECP pixelation to create a texture which is wrapped around the sphere. In calculating the power spectrum, the spherical harmonic transforms are computed using the same ECP pixelation. This inevitably leads to some discrepancies at small scales due to repixelation effects, but they are reasonably small.

This is an implementation of a fairly simple-minded luminosity distance fitter, intended for use with supernova data. The calculational technique is based on evaluating the $chi^2$ of the model fit on a grid and marginalization over various nuisance parameters. Of course, the nature of these things is that this code has gotten steadily more complex, so perhaps the simple moniker is no longer justified.

SiFTO is an empirical method for modeling Type Ia supernova (SN Ia) light curves by manipulating a spectral template. We make use of high-redshift SN data when training the model, allowing us to extend it bluer than rest-frame U. This increases the utility of our high-redshift SN observations by allowing us to use more of the available data. We find that when the shape of the light curve is described using a stretch prescription, applying the same stretch at all wavelengths is not an adequate description. SiFTO therefore uses a generalization of stretch which applies different stretch factors as a function of both the wavelength of the observed filter and the stretch in the rest-frame B band. SiFTO has been compared to other published light-curve models by applying them to the same set of SN photometry, and it's been demonstrated that SiFTO and SALT2 perform better than the alternatives when judged by the scatter around the best-fit luminosity distance relationship. When SiFTO and SALT2 are trained on the same data set the cosmological results agree.

This module is a plug-in for CosmoMC and requires that software. Though programmed to analyze SNLS3 SN data, it can also be used for other SN data provided the inputs are put in the right form. In fact, this is probably a good idea, since the default treatment that comes with CosmoMC is flawed. Note that this requires fitting two additional SN nuisance parameters (alpha and beta), but this is significantly faster than attempting to marginalize over them internally.

MIS is a pipeline toolkit using the package MIRIAD to combine Interferometric and Single Dish data. This was prompted by our observations made with the Combined Array For Research in Millimeter-wave Astronomy (CARMA) interferometer of the star-forming region NGC 1333, a large survey highlighting the new 23-element and singledish observing modes. The project consists of 20 CARMA datasets each containing interferometric as well as simultaneously obtained single dish data, for 3 molecular spectral lines and continuum, in 527 different pointings, covering an area of about 8 by 11 arcminutes. A small group of collaborators then shared this toolkit and their parameters via CVS, and scripts were developed to ensure uniform data reduction across the group. The pipeline was run end-to-end each night that new observations were obtained, producing maps that contained all the data to date. This approach could serve as a model for repeated calibration and mapping of large mixed-mode correlation datasets from ALMA.

PySpecKit is a Python spectroscopic analysis and reduction toolkit meant to be generally applicable to optical, infrared, and radio spectra. It is capable of reading FITS-standard and many non-standard file types including CLASS spectra. It contains procedures for line fitting including gaussian and voigt profile fitters, and baseline-subtraction routines. It is capable of more advanced line fitting using arbitrary model grids. Fitting can be done both in batch mode and interactively. PySpecKit also produces publication-quality plots with TeX axis labels and annotations. It is designed to be extensible, allowing user-written reader, writer, and fitting routines to be "plugged in." It is actively under development and currently in the 'alpha' phase, with plans for a beta release.

The goal of the development of the Aarhus Adiabatic Oscillation Package was to have a simple and efficient tool for the computation of adiabatic oscillation frequencies and eigenfunctions for general stellar models, emphasizing also the accuracy of the results. The Fortran code offers considerable flexibility in the choice of integration method as well as ability to determine all frequencies of a given model, in a given range of degree and frequency. Development of the Aarhus adiabatic pulsation code started around 1978. Although the main features have been stable for more than a decade, development of the code is continuing, concerning numerical properties and output. The code has been provided as a generally available package and has seen substantial use at a number of installations. Further development of the package, including bringing the documentation closer to being up to date, is planned as part of the HELAS Coordination Action.

SKIRT is a radiative transfer code based on the Monte Carlo technique. The name SKIRT, acronym for Stellar Kinematics Including Radiative Transfer, reflects the original motivation for its creation: it has been developed to study the effects of dust absorption and scattering on the observed kinematics of dusty galaxies. In a second stage, the SKIRT code was extended with a module to self-consistently calculate the dust emission spectrum under the assumption of local thermal equilibrium. This LTE version of SKIRT has been used to model the dust extinction and emission of various types of galaxies, as well as circumstellar discs and clumpy tori around active galactic nuclei. A new, extended version of SKIRT code can perform efficient 3D radiative transfer calculations including a self-consistent calculation of the dust temperature distribution and the associated FIR/submm emission with a full incorporation of the emission of transiently heated grains and PAH molecules.

A big challenge in solar and stellar physics in the coming years will be to decipher the magnetism of the solar outer atmosphere (chromosphere and corona) along with its dynamic coupling with the magnetic fields of the underlying photosphere. To this end, it is important to develop rigorous diagnostic tools for the physical interpretation of spectropolarimetric observations in suitably chosen spectral lines. HAZEL is a computer program for the synthesis and inversion of Stokes profiles caused by the joint action of atomic level polarization and the Hanle and Zeeman effects in some spectral lines of diagnostic interest, such as those of the He I 1083.0 nm and 587.6 nm (or D3) multiplets. It is based on the quantum theory of spectral line polarization, which takes into account in a rigorous way all the relevant physical mechanisms and ingredients (optical pumping, atomic level polarization, level crossings and repulsions, Zeeman, Paschen-Back and Hanle effects). The influence of radiative transfer on the emergent spectral line radiation is taken into account through a suitable slab model. The user can either calculate the emergent intensity and polarization for any given magnetic field vector or infer the dynamical and magnetic properties from the observed Stokes profiles via an efficient inversion algorithm based on global optimization methods.

PolSpice (aka Spice) is a tool to statistically analyze Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data, as well as any other diffuse data pixelized on the sphere.

This Fortran90 program measures the 2 point auto (or cross-) correlation functions w(θ) and the angular auto- (or cross-) power spectra C(l) from one or (two) sky map(s) of Stokes parameters (intensity I and linear polarisation Q and U). It is based on the fast Spherical Harmonic Transforms allowed by isolatitude pixelisations such as Healpix [for Npix pixels over the whole sky, and a C(l) computed up to l=lmax, PolSpice complexity scales like Npix1/2 lmax2 instead of Npix lmax2]. It corrects for the effects of the masks and can deal with inhomogeneous weights given to the pixels of the map. In the case of polarised data, the mixing of the E and B modes due to the cut sky and pixel weights can be corrected for to provide an unbiased estimate of the "magnetic" (B) component of the polarisation power spectrum. Most of the code is parallelized for shared memory (SMP) architecture using OpenMP.

We present further development and the first public release of our multimodal nested sampling algorithm, called MultiNest. This Bayesian inference tool calculates the evidence, with an associated error estimate, and produces posterior samples from distributions that may contain multiple modes and pronounced (curving) degeneracies in high dimensions. The developments presented here lead to further substantial improvements in sampling efficiency and robustness, as compared to the original algorithm presented in Feroz & Hobson (2008), which itself significantly outperformed existing MCMC techniques in a wide range of astrophysical inference problems. The accuracy and economy of the MultiNest algorithm is demonstrated by application to two toy problems and to a cosmological inference problem focusing on the extension of the vanilla $Lambda$CDM model to include spatial curvature and a varying equation of state for dark energy. The MultiNest software is fully parallelized using MPI and includes an interface to CosmoMC (ascl:1106.025). It will also be released as part of the SuperBayeS package (ascl:1109.007) for the analysis of supersymmetric theories of particle physics.

SuperBayeS is a package for fast and efficient sampling of supersymmetric theories. It uses Bayesian techniques to explore multidimensional SUSY parameter spaces and to compare SUSY predictions with observable quantities, including sparticle masses, collider observables, dark matter abundance, direct detection cross sections, indirect detection quantities etc. Scanning can be performed using Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technology or even more efficiently by employing a new scanning technique called MultiNest (ascl:1109.006). which implements the nested sampling algorithm. Using MultiNest, a full 8-dimensional scan of the CMSSM takes about 12 hours on 10 2.4GHz CPUs. There is also an option for old-style fixed-grid scanning. A discussion forum for SuperBayeS is available.

The package combines SoftSusy, DarkSusy, FeynHiggs, Bdecay, MultiNest and MicrOMEGAs. Some of the routines and the plotting tools are based on CosmoMC.

SuperBayeS comes with SuperEGO, a MATLAB graphical user interface tool for interactive plotting of the results. SuperEGO has been developed by Rachid Lemrani and is based on CosmoloGUI by Sarah Bridle.

We propose a novel representation of cosmic microwave anisotropy maps, where each multipole order l is represented by l unit vectors pointing in directions on the sky and an overall magnitude. These "multipole vectors and scalars" transform as vectors under rotations. Like the usual spherical harmonics, multipole vectors form an irreducible representation of the proper rotation group SO(3). However, they are related to the familiar spherical harmonic coefficients, alm, in a nonlinear way, and are therefore sensitive to different aspects of the CMB anisotropy. Nevertheless, it is straightforward to determine the multipole vectors for a given CMB map and we present an algorithm to compute them. Using the WMAP full-sky maps, we perform several tests of the hypothesis that the CMB anisotropy is statistically isotropic and Gaussian random. We find that the result from comparing the oriented area of planes defined by these vectors between multipole pairs 2<=l1!=l2<=8 is inconsistent with the isotropic Gaussian hypothesis at the 99.4% level for the ILC map and at 98.9% level for the cleaned map of Tegmark et al. A particular correlation is suggested between the l=3 and l=8 multipoles, as well as several other pairs. This effect is entirely different from the now familiar planarity and alignment of the quadrupole and octupole: while the aforementioned is fairly unlikely, the multipole vectors indicate correlations not expected in Gaussian random skies that make them unusually likely. The result persists after accounting for pixel noise and after assuming a residual 10% dust contamination in the cleaned WMAP map. While the definitive analysis of these results will require more work, we hope that multipole vectors will become a valuable tool for various cosmological tests, in particular those of cosmic isotropy.

CMBquick is a package for Mathematica in which tools are provided to compute the spectrum and bispectrum of Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). It is unavoidably slow, but the main goal is not to design a tool which can be used for systematic exploration of parameters in cosmology, but rather a toy CMB code which is transparent and easily modified. Considering this, the name chosen is nothing but a joke which refers to the widely spread and used softwares CMBFAST, CAMB or CMBeasy (ascl:1007.004), which should be used for serious and heavy first order CMB computations, and which are indeed very fast.

The package CMBquick is unavoidably slow when it comes to compute the multipoles Cls, and most of it is due to the access time for variables which in Mathematica is approximately ten times slower than in C or Fortran. CMBquick is thus approximately 10 times slower than CAMB and cannot be used for the same reasons. It uses the same method as CAMB for computing the CMB spectrum, which is based on the line of sight approach. However the integration is performed in a different gauge with different time steps and k-spacing. It benefits from the power of Mathematica on numerical resolution of stiff differential systems, and the transfer functions can be obtained with exquisite accuracy.

The purpose of CMBquick is thus twofold. First, CMBquick is a slow but precise and pedagogical, tool which can be used to explore and modify the physical content of the linear and non-linear dynamics. Second, it is a tool which can help developing templates for nonlinear computations, which could then be hard coded once their correctness is checked. The number of equations for non-linear dynamics is quite sizable and CMBquick makes it easy (but slow) to manipulate the non-linear equations, to solve them precisely, and to plot them.

PyModelFit provides a pythonic, object-oriented framework that simplifies the task of designing numerical models to fit data. This is a very broad task, and hence the current functionality of PyModelFit focuses on the simpler tasks of 1D curve-fitting, including a GUI interface to simplify interactive work (using Enthought Traits). For more complicated modeling, PyModelFit also provides a wide range of classes and a framework to support more general model/data types (2D to Scalar, 3D to Scalar, 3D to 3D, and so on).

GalactICS generates N-body realizations of axisymmetric galaxy models consisting of disk, bulge and halo. Some of the code is in Fortran 77, using lines longer than 72 characters in some cases. The -e flag in the makefile allow for this for a Solaris f77 compiler. Other programs are written in C. Again, the linking between these routines works on Solaris systems, but may need to be adjusted for other architectures. We have found that linking using f77 instead of ld will often automatically load the appropriate libraries.

The graphics output by some of the programs (dbh, plotforce, diskdf, plothalo) uses the PGPLOT library. Alternatively, remove all calls to routines with names starting with "PG", as well as the -lpgplot flag in the Makefile, and the programs should still run fine.

We present a method to numerically estimate the densities of a discretely sampled data based on a binary space partitioning tree. We start with a root node containing all the particles and then recursively divide each node into two nodes each containing roughly equal number of particles, until each of the nodes contains only one particle. The volume of such a leaf node provides an estimate of the local density and its shape provides an estimate of the variance. We implement an entropy-based node splitting criterion that results in a significant improvement in the estimation of densities compared to earlier work. The method is completely metric free and can be applied to arbitrary number of dimensions. We use this method to determine the appropriate metric at each point in space and then use kernel-based methods for calculating the density. The kernel-smoothed estimates were found to be more accurate and have lower dispersion. We apply this method to determine the phase-space densities of dark matter haloes obtained from cosmological N-body simulations. We find that contrary to earlier studies, the volume distribution function v(f) of phase-space density f does not have a constant slope but rather a small hump at high phase-space densities. We demonstrate that a model in which a halo is made up by a superposition of Hernquist spheres is not capable in explaining the shape of v(f) versus f relation, whereas a model which takes into account the contribution of the main halo separately roughly reproduces the behaviour as seen in simulations. The use of the presented method is not limited to calculation of phase-space densities, but can be used as a general purpose data-mining tool and due to its speed and accuracy it is ideally suited for analysis of large multidimensional data sets.

I introduce a new code for fast calculation of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram, that leverages the computing power of graphics processing units (GPUs). After establishing a background to the newly emergent field of GPU computing, I discuss the code design and narrate key parts of its source. Benchmarking calculations indicate no significant differences in accuracy compared to an equivalent CPU-based code. However, the differences in performance are pronounced; running on a low-end GPU, the code can match 8 CPU cores, and on a high-end GPU it is faster by a factor approaching thirty. Applications of the code include analysis of long photometric time series obtained by ongoing satellite missions and upcoming ground-based monitoring facilities; and Monte-Carlo simulation of periodogram statistical properties.

Flux-averaging justifies the use of the distance-redshift relation for a smooth universe in the analysis of type Ia supernova (SN Ia) data. Flux-averaging of SN Ia data is required to yield cosmological parameter constraints that are free of the bias induced by weak gravitational lensing. SN Ia data are converted into flux. For a given cosmological model, the distance dependence of the data is removed, then the data are binned in redshift, and placed at the average redshift in each redshift bin. The likelihood of the given cosmological model is then computed using "flux statistics''. These Fortran codes compute the likelihood of an arbitrary cosmological model [with given H(z)/H_0] using flux-averaged Type Ia supernova data.

WCSTools is a package of programs and a library of utility subroutines for setting and using the world coordinate systems (WCS) in the headers of the most common astronomical image formats, FITS and IRAF .imh, to relate image pixels to sky coordinates. In addition to dealing with image WCS information, WCSTools has extensive catalog search, image header manipulation, and coordinate and time conversion tasks. This software is all written in very portable C, so it should compile and run on any computer with a C compiler.

aXe is a spectroscopic data extraction software package that was designed to handle large format spectroscopic slitless images such as those from the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on HST. aXe is a PyRAF/IRAF package that consists of several tasks and is distributed as part of the Space Telescope Data Analysis System (STSDAS). The various aXe tasks perform specific parts of the extraction and calibration process and are successively used to produce extracted spectra.

We describe the InfraRed Data Reduction (IRDR) software package, a small ANSI C library of fast image processing routines for automated pipeline reduction of infrared (dithered) observations. We developed the software to satisfy certain design requirements not met in existing packages (e.g., full weight map handling) and to optimize the software for large data sets (non-interactive tasks that are CPU and disk efficient). The software includes stand-alone C programs for tasks such as running sky frame subtraction with object masking, image registration and coaddition with weight maps, dither offset measurement using cross-correlation, and object mask dilation. Although we currently use the software to process data taken with CIRSI (a near-IR mosaic imager), the software is modular and concise and should be easy to adapt/reuse for other work.

GIPSY is an acronym of Groningen Image Processing SYstem. It is a highly interactive software system for the reduction and display of astronomical data. It supports multi-tasking using a versatile user interface, it has an advanced data structure, a powerful script language and good display facilities based on the X Window system.

GIPSY consists of a number of components which can be divided into a number of classes: 1.) The user interfaces. Currently two user interfaces are available; one for interactive work and one for batch processing. 2.) The data structure. 3.) The display utilities. 4.) The application programs. These are the majority of programs.

GIPSY was designed originally for the reduction of interferometric data from the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope, but in its history of more than 20 years it has grown to a system capable of handling data from many different instruments (e.g. TAURUS, IRAS etc.).

SkyCat is a tool that combines visualization of images and access to catalogs and archive data for astronomy. The tool, developed in Tcl/Tk, was originally conceived as a demo of the capabilities of the class library that was developed for the VLT. The Skycat sources currently consist of five packages:

• Tclutil - Generic Tcl and C++ utilities
• Astrotcl - Astronomical Tcl and C++ utilities
• RTD - Real-time Display classes and widgets
• Catlib - Catalog library and widgets
• Skycat - Skycat application and library package

All of the required packages are always included in the tarfile.

A radiative transfer code designed to solve the radiative transfer and statistical equilibrium equations in spherical geometry. It has been designed for application to W-R stars, O stars, and Luminous Blue-Variables. CMFGEN allows fundamental parameters such as effective temperatures, stellar radii and stellar luminosities to be determined. It can provide constraints on mass-loss rates, and allow abundance determinations for a wide range of atomic species. Further it can provide accurate energy distributions, and hence ionizing fluxes, which can be used as input for codes which model the spectra of HII regions and ring nebular.

TLUSTY is a user-oriented package written in FORTRAN77 for modeling stellar atmospheres and accretion disks and wide range of spectroscopic diagnostics. In the program's maximum configuration, the user may start from scratch and calculate a model atmosphere of a chosen degree of complexity, and end with a synthetic spectrum in a wavelength region of interest for an arbitrary stellar rotation and an arbitrary instrumental profile. The user may also model the vertical structure of annuli of an accretion disk.

Synspec is a user-oriented package written in FORTRAN for modeling stellar atmospheres and for stellar spectroscopic diagnostics. It assumes an existing model atmosphere, calculated previously with Tlusty or taken from the literature (for instance, from the Kurucz grid of models). The opacity sources (continua, atomic and molecular lines) are fully specified by the user. An arbitrary stellar rotation and instrumental profile can be applied to the synthetic spectrum.

MOKA simulates the gravitational lensing signal from cluster-sized haloes. This algorithm implements recent results from numerical simulations to create realistic lenses with properties independent of numerical resolution and can be used for studies of the strong lensing cross section in dependence of halo structure.

Jupiter is a multidimensional astrophysical hydrocode. It is based on a Godunov method, and it is parallelized with MPI. The mesh geometry can either be cartesian, cylindrical or spherical. It allows mesh refinement and includes special features adapted to the description of planets embedded in disks and nearly steady states.

The IMCAT software was developed initially to do faint galaxy photometry for weak lensing studies, and provides a fairly complete set of tools for this kind of work. Unlike most packages for doing data analysis, the tools are standalone unix commands which you can invoke from the shell, via shell scripts or from perl scripts. The tools are arranges in a tree of directories. One main branch is the ’imtools’. These deal only with fits files. The most important imtool is the ’image calculator’ ’ic’ which allows one to do rather general operations on fits images. A second branch is the ’catools’ which operate only on catalogues. The key cattool is ’lc’; this effectively defines the format of IMCAT catalogues, and allows one to do very general operations on and filtering of such catalogues. A third branch is the ’imcattools’. These tend to be much more specialised than the cattools and imcattools and are focussed on faint galaxy photometry.

Current and upcoming wide-field, ground-based, broad-band imaging surveys promise to address a wide range of outstanding problems in galaxy formation and cosmology. Several such uses of ground-based data, especially weak gravitational lensing, require highly precise measurements of galaxy image statistics with careful correction for the effects of the point-spread function (PSF). The SHERA (SHEar Reconvolution Analysis) software simulates ground-based imaging data with realistic galaxy morphologies and observing conditions, starting from space-based data (from COSMOS, the Cosmological Evolution Survey) and accounting for the effects of the space-based PSF. This code simulates ground-based data, optionally with a weak lensing shear applied, in a model-independent way using a general Fourier space formalism. The utility of this pipeline is that it allows for a precise, realistic assessment of systematic errors due to the method of data processing, for example in extracting weak lensing galaxy shape measurements or galaxy radial profiles, given user-supplied observational conditions and real galaxy morphologies. Moreover, the simulations allow for the empirical test of error estimates and determination of parameter degeneracies, via generation of many noise maps. The public release of this software, along with a large sample of cleaned COSMOS galaxy images (corrected for charge transfer inefficiency), should enable upcoming ground-based imaging surveys to achieve their potential in the areas of precision weak lensing analysis, galaxy profile measurement, and other applications involving detailed image analysis.

This code is no longer maintained and has been superseded by GalSim (ascl:1402.009).

WCSLIB is a C library, supplied with a full set of Fortran wrappers, that implements the "World Coordinate System" (WCS) standard in FITS (Flexible Image Transport System). It also includes a PGPLOT-based routine, PGSBOX, for drawing general curvilinear coordinate graticules and a number of utility programs.

Galacticus is designed to solve the physics involved in the formation of galaxies within the current standard cosmological framework. It is of a type of model known as “semi-analytic” in which the numerous complex non-linear physics involved are solved using a combination of analytic approximations and empirical calibrations from more detailed, numerical solutions. Models of this type aim to begin with the initial state of the Universe (specified shortly after the Big Bang) and apply physical principles to determine the properties of galaxies in the Universe at later times, including the present day. Typical properties computed include the mass of stars and gas in each galaxy, broad structural properties (e.g. radii, rotation speeds, geometrical shape etc.), dark matter and black hole contents, and observable quantities such as luminosities, chemical composition etc.

Gaepsi is a PYTHON extension for visualizing cosmology simulations produced by Gadget. Visualization is the most important facet of Gaepsi, but it also allows data analysis on GADGET simulations with its growing number of physics related subroutines and constants. Unlike mesh based scheme, SPH simulations are directly visible in the sense that a splatting process is required to produce raster images from the simulations. Gaepsi produces images of 2-dimensional line-of-sight projections of the simulation. Scalar fields and vector fields are both supported.

Besides the traditional way of slicing a simulation, Gaepsi also has built-in support of 'Survey-like' domain transformation proposed by Carlson & White. An improved implementation is used in Gaepsi. Gaepsi both implements an interactive shell for plotting and exposes its API for batch processing. When complied with OpenMP, Gaepsi automatically takes the advantage of the multi-core computers. In interactive mode, Gaepsi is capable of producing images of size up to 32000 x 32000 pixels. The user can zoom, pan and rotate the field with a command in on the finger tip. The interactive mode takes full advantages of matplotlib's rich annotating, labeling and image composition facilities. There are also built-in commands to add objects that are commonly used in cosmology simulations to the figures.

The study of stellar populations in galaxies is entering a new era with the availability of large and high quality databases of both observed galactic spectra and state-of-the-art evolutionary synthesis models. The power of spectral synthesis can be investigated as a mean to estimate physical properties of galaxies. Spectral synthesis is nothing more than the decomposition of an observed spectrum in terms of a superposition of a base of simple stellar populations of various ages and metallicities, producing astrophysically interesting output such as the star-formation and chemical enrichment histories of a galaxy, its extinction and velocity dispersion. This is what the STARLIGHT spectral synthesis code does.

PÉGASE (Projet d'Étude des GAlaxies par Synthèse Évolutive) is a code to compute the spectral evolution of galaxies. The evolution of the stars, gas and metals is followed for a law of star formation and a stellar initial mass function. The stellar evolutionary tracks extend from the main sequence to the white dwarf stage. The emission of the gas in HII regions is also taken into account. The main improvement in version 2 is the use of evolutionary tracks of different metallicities (from 10-4 to 5×solar). The effect of extinction by dust is also modelled using a radiative transfer code. PÉGASE.2 uses the BaSeL library of stellar spectra and can therefore synthesize low-resolution (R~200) ultraviolet to near-infrared spectra of Hubble sequence galaxies as well as of starbursts.

PÉGASE-HR is a code aimed at computing synthetic evolutive optical spectra of galaxies with a very high resolution (R=10 000, or dlambda=0.55) in the range Lambda=[4000, 6800] Angstroms. PÉGASE-HR is the result of combining the code PÉGASE.2 with the high-resolution stellar library ÉLODIE. This code can also be used at low resolution (R=200) over the range covered by the BaSeL library (from far UV to the near IR), and then produces the same results as PÉGASE.2. In PEGASE-HR, the BaSeL library is replaced by a grid of spectra interpolated from the high-resolution ÉLODIE library of stellar spectra. The ÉLODIE library is a stellar database of 1959 spectra for 1503 stars, observed with the echelle spectrograph ÉLODIE on the 193 cm telescope at the Observatoire de Haute Provence.

LePHARE is a set of Fortran commands to compute photometric redshifts and to perform SED fitting. The latest version includes new features with FIR fitting and a more complete treatment of physical parameters and uncertainties based on PÉGASE and Bruzual & Charlot population synthesis models. The program is based on a simple chi2 fitting method between the theoretical and observed photometric catalogue. A simulation program is also available in order to generate realistic multi-colour catalogues taking into account observational effects.

From a photometric catalogue, hyperz finds the redshift of each object by means of a standard SED fitting procedure, i.e. comparing the observed magnitudes with the expected ones, computed from template Spectral Energy Distributions. The set of templates used in the minimization procedure (age, metallicity, reddening, absorption in the Lyman forest, ...) is studied in detail, through both real and simulated data. The expected accuracy of photometric redshifts, as well as the fraction of catastrophic identifications and wrong detections, is given as a function of the redshift range, the set of filters considered, and the photometric accuracy. Special attention is paid to the results expected from real data.

Photometric redshift estimation is becoming an increasingly important technique, although the currently existing methods present several shortcomings which hinder their application. Most of those drawbacks are efficiently eliminated when Bayesian probability is consistently applied to this problem. The use of prior probabilities and Bayesian marginalization allows the inclusion of valuable information, e.g. the redshift distributions or the galaxy type mix, which is often ignored by other methods. In those cases when the a priori information is insufficient, it is shown how to `calibrate' the prior distributions, using even the data under consideration. There is an excellent agreement between the 108 HDF spectroscopic redshifts and the predictions of the method, with a rms error Delta z/(1+z_spec) = 0.08 up to z<6 and no systematic biases nor outliers. The results obtained are more reliable than those of standard techniques even when the latter include near-IR colors. The Bayesian formalism developed here can be generalized to deal with a wide range of problems which make use of photometric redshifts, e.g. the estimation of individual galaxy characteristics as the metallicity, dust content, etc., or the study of galaxy evolution and the cosmological parameters from large multicolor surveys. Finally, using Bayesian probability it is possible to develop an integrated statistical method for cluster mass reconstruction which simultaneously considers the information provided by gravitational lensing and photometric redshifts.

TITAN is a general-purpose radiation hydrodynamics code developed at the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics (NCSA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). TITAN solves the coupled sets of radiation transfer and fluid dynamics equations on an adaptive mesh in one spatial dimension.

STELLA is a one-dimensional multi-group radiation hydrodynamics code. STELLA incorporates implicit hydrodynamics coupled to a multi-group non-equilibrium radiative transfer for modeling SN II-L light curves. The non-equilibrium description of radiation is crucial for this problem since the presupernova envelope may be of low mass and very dilute. STELLA implicitly treats time dependent equations of the angular moments of intensity averaged over a frequency bin. Local thermodynamic equilibrium is assumed to determine the ionization levels of materials.

RADICAL is a multi-purpose 2-D radiative transfer code for axi-symmetric circumstellar (or circum-black-hole) envelopes /disks / tori etc. It has been extensively tested and found reliable and accurate. The code has recently been supplemented with a Variable Eddington Tensor module which enables it to solve dust continuum radiative transfer problems from very low up to extremely high optical depths with only a few (about 7) iterations at most.

DISKSTRUCT is a simple 1+1-D code for modeling protoplanetary disks. It is not based on multidimensional radiative transfer! Instead, a flaring-angle recipe is used to compute the irradiation of the disk, while the disk vertical structure at each cylindrical radius is computed in a 1-D fashion; the models computed with this code are therefore approximate. Moreover, this model cannot deal with the dust inner rim.

In spite of these simplifications and drawbacks, the code can still be very useful for disk studies, for the following reasons:

• It allows the disk structure to be studied in a 1-D vertical fashion (one radial cylinder at a time). For understanding the structure of disks, and also for using it as a basis of other models, this can be a great advantage.
• For very optically thick disks this code is likely to be much faster than the RADMC full disk model.
• Viscous internal heating of the disk is implemented and converges quickly, whereas the RADMC code is still having difficulty to deal with high optical depth combined with viscously generated internal heat.

RADMC is a 2-D Monte-Carlo code for dust continuum radiative transfer circumstellar disks and envelopes. It is based on the method of Bjorkman & Wood (ApJ 2001, 554, 615), but with several modifications to produce smoother results with fewer photon packages.

SHELLSPEC calculates lightcurves, spectra and images of interacting binaries and extrasolar planets immersed in a moving circumstellar environment which is optically thin. It solves simple radiative transfer along the line of sight in moving media. The assumptions include LTE and optional known state quantities and velocity fields in 3D. Optional (non)transparent objects such as a spot, disc, stream, jet, shell or stars as well as an empty space may be defined (embedded) in 3D and their composite synthetic spectrum calculated. Roche model can be used as a boundary condition for the radiative tranfer. A related code based on SHELLSPEC, Pyshellspec (ascl:2106.006), solves the inverse problem of finding the stellar and orbital parameters.

STECKMAP stands for STEllar Content and Kinematics via Maximum A Posteriori likelihood. It is a tool for interpreting galaxy spectra in terms of their stellar populations through the derivation of their star formation history, age-metallicity relation, kinematics and extinction. The observed spectrum is projected onto a temporal sequence of models of single stellar populations, so as to determine a linear combination of these models that best fits the observed spectrum. The weights of the various components of this linear combination indicate the stellar content of the population. This procedure is regularized using various penalizing functions. The principles of the method are detailed in Ocvirk et al. 2006.

The basic mechanisms responsible for producing winds from cool, late-type stars are still largely unknown. We take inspiration from recent progress in understanding solar wind acceleration to develop a physically motivated model of the time-steady mass loss rates of cool main-sequence stars and evolved giants. This model follows the energy flux of magnetohydrodynamic turbulence from a subsurface convection zone to its eventual dissipation and escape through open magnetic flux tubes. We show how Alfven waves and turbulence can produce winds in either a hot corona or a cool extended chromosphere, and we specify the conditions that determine whether or not coronal heating occurs. These models do not utilize arbitrary normalization factors, but instead predict the mass loss rate directly from a star's fundamental properties. We take account of stellar magnetic activity by extending standard age-activity-rotation indicators to include the evolution of the filling factor of strong photospheric magnetic fields. We compared the predicted mass loss rates with observed values for 47 stars and found significantly better agreement than was obtained from the popular scaling laws of Reimers, Schroeder, and Cuntz. The algorithm used to compute cool-star mass loss rates is provided as a self-contained and efficient IDL computer code. We anticipate that the results from this kind of model can be incorporated straightforwardly into stellar evolution calculations and population synthesis techniques.

We present an algorithm to identify the type of an SN spectrum and to determine its redshift and age. This algorithm, based on the correlation techniques of Tonry & Davis, is implemented in the Supernova Identification (SNID) code. It is used by members of ongoing high-redshift SN searches to distinguish between type Ia and type Ib/c SNe, and to identify "peculiar" SNe Ia. We develop a diagnostic to quantify the quality of a correlation between the input and template spectra, which enables a formal evaluation of the associated redshift error. Furthermore, by comparing the correlation redshifts obtained using SNID with those determined from narrow lines in the SN host galaxy spectrum, we show that accurate redshifts (with a typical error less than 0.01) can be determined for SNe Ia without a spectrum of the host galaxy. Last, the age of an input spectrum is determined with a typical 3-day accuracy, shown here by using high-redshift SNe Ia with well-sampled light curves. The success of the correlation technique confirms the similarity of some SNe Ia at low and high redshifts. The SNID code, which is available to the community, can also be used for comparative studies of SN spectra, as well as comparisons between data and models.

GIBIS is a pixel-level simulator of the Gaia mission. It is intended to simulate how the Gaia instruments will observe the sky, using realistic simulations of the astronomical sources and of the instrumental properties. It is a branch of the global Gaia Simulator under development within the Gaia DPAC CU2 Group (Data Simulations). Access is currently restricted to Gaia DPAC teams.

With the increase of personal storage capacity, it is easy to find hundreds to thousands of FITS files in the personal computer of an astrophysicist. Because Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is a professional data format initiated by astronomers and used mainly in the small community, data management toolkits for FITS files are very few. Astronomers need a powerful tool to help them manage their local astronomical data. Although Virtual Observatory (VO) is a network oriented astronomical research environment, its applications and related technologies provide useful solutions to enhance the management and utilization of astronomical data hosted in an astronomer's personal computer. FITSManager is such a tool to provide astronomers an efficient management and utilization of their local data, bringing VO to astronomers in a seamless and transparent way. FITSManager provides fruitful functions for FITS file management, like thumbnail, preview, type dependent icons, header keyword indexing and search, collaborated working with other tools and online services, and so on. The development of the FITSManager is an effort to fill the gap between management and analysis of astronomical data.

This code combines the spectral sum-conserving methods of Weichselbaum and von Delft and of Peters, Pruschke and Anders (both relying upon the complete basis set construction of Anders and Schiller) with the use of non-Abelian symmetries in a flexible manner: Essentially any non-Abelian symmetry can be taught to the code, and any number of such symmetries can be used throughout the computation for any density of states, and to compute any local operators' correlation function's real and imaginary parts or any thermodynamical expectation value. The code works both at zero and finite temperatures.

Sherpa is the CIAO (ascl:1311.006) modeling and fitting application made available by the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC). It can be used for analysis of images, spectra and time series from many telescopes, including optical telescopes such as Hubble. Sherpa is flexible, modular and extensible. It has an IPython user interface and it is also an importable Python module. Sherpa models, optimization and statistic functions are available via both C++ and Python for software developers wishing to link such functions directly to their own compiled code.

The CIAO 4.3 Sherpa release supports fitting of 1-D X-ray spectra from Chandra and other X-ray missions, as well as 1-D non-X-ray data, including ASCII data arrays, radial profiles, and lightcurves. The options for grating data analysis include fitting the spectrum with multiple response files required for overlapping orders in LETG observations. Modeling of 2-D spatial data is fully supported, including the PSF and exposure maps. User specified models can be added to Sherpa with advanced "user model" functionality.

The objective of this work is to report on the influence of muon interactions on the development of air showers initiated by astroparticles. We make a comparative study of the different theoretical approaches to muon bremsstrahlung and muonic pair production interactions. A detailed algorithm that includes all the relevant characteristics of such processes has been implemented in the AIRES air shower simulation system. We have simulated ultra high energy showers in different conditions in order to measure the influence of these muonic electromagnetic interactions. We have found that during the late stages of the shower development (well beyond the shower maximum) many global observables are significantly modified in relative terms when the mentioned interactions are taken into account. This is most evident in the case of the electromagnetic component of very inclined showers. On the other hand, our simulations indicate that the studied processes do not induce significant changes either in the position of the shower maximum or the structure of the shower front surface.

AMUSE is an open source software framework for large-scale simulations in astrophysics, in which existing codes for gravitational dynamics, stellar evolution, hydrodynamics and radiative transport can be easily coupled and placed in the appropriate observational context.

We have developed a detailed stellar evolution code capable of following the simultaneous evolution of both stars in a binary system, together with their orbital properties. To demonstrate the capabilities of the code we investigate potential progenitors for the Type IIb supernova 1993J, which is believed to have been an interacting binary system prior to its primary exploding. We use our detailed binary stellar evolution code to model this system to determine the possible range of primary and secondary masses that could have produced the observed characteristics of this system, with particular reference to the secondary. Using the luminosities and temperatures for both stars (as determined by Maund et al. 2004) and the remaining mass of the hydrogen envelope of the primary at the time of explosion, we find that if mass transfer is 100 per cent efficient the observations can be reproduced by a system consisting of a 15 solar mass primary and a 14 solar mass secondary in an orbit with an initial period of 2100 days. With a mass transfer efficiency of 50 per cent, a more massive system consisting of a 17 solar mass primary and a 16 solar mass secondary in an initial orbit of 2360 days is needed. We also investigate some of the uncertainties in the evolution, including the effects of tidal interaction, convective overshooting and thermohaline mixing.

The freely available Monte Carlo code REAS for modelling radio emission from cosmic ray air showers has evolved to include the full complexity of air shower physics. REAS3 improves the calculation of the emission contributions, which was not fully consistent in earlier versions of REAS, by incorporating the missing radio emission due to the variation of the number of charged particles during the air shower evolution using an "end-point formalism". With the inclusion of these emission contributions, the structure of the simulated radio pulses changes from unipolar to bipolar, and the azimuthal emission pattern becomes nearly symmetric. Remaining asymmetries can be explained by radio emission due to the variation of the net charge excess in air showers, which is automatically taken into account in the new implementation. REAS3 constitutes the first self-consistent time-domain implementation based on single particle emission taking the full complexity of air shower physics into account, and is freely available for all interested users. REAS3 has been superseded by CoREAS (ascl:1406.003).

The CL-based package XDSPRES is a complete reducing facility for cross-dispersed spectra taken with the Ohio State Infrared Imager/Spectrometer, as installed at the SOAR telescope. This instrument provides spectra in the range between 1.2um and 2.35um in a single exposure, with resolving power of R ~ 1200. XDSPRES consists of two tasks, namely xdflat and doosiris. The former is a completely automated code for preparing normalized flat field images from raw flat field exposures. Doosiris provides a complete reduction pipeline that requires a minimum of user interaction. The user guide explains the general steps towards a fully reduced spectrum.

ARCHANGEL is a Unix-based package for the surface photometry of galaxies. While oriented for large angular size systems (i.e. many pixels), its tools can be applied to any imaging data of any size. The package core contains routines to perform the following critical galaxy photometry functions: sky determination; frame cleaning; ellipse fitting; profile fitting; and total and isophotal magnitudes.

The goal of the package is to provide an automated, assembly-line type of reduction system for galaxy photometry of space-based or ground-based imaging data. The procedures outlined in the documentation are flux independent, thus, these routines can be used for non-optical data as well as typical imaging datasets.

ARCHANGEL has been tested on several current OS's (RedHat Linux, Ubuntu Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X). A tarball for installation is available at the download page. The main routines are Python and FORTRAN based, therefore, a current installation of Python and a FORTRAN compiler are required. The ARCHANGEL package also contains Python hooks to the PGPLOT package, an XML processor and network tools which automatically link to data archives (i.e. NED, HST, 2MASS, etc) to download images in a non-interactive manner.

LIME solves the molecular and atomic excitation and radiation transfer problem in a molecular gas and predicting emergent spectra. The code works in arbitrary three dimensional geometry using unstructured Delaunay latices for the transport of photons. Various physical models can be used as input, ranging from analytical descriptions over tabulated models to SPH simulations. To generate the Delaunay grid we sample the input model randomly, but weigh the sample probability with the molecular density and other parameters, and thereby we obtain an average grid point separation that scales with the local opacity. Slow convergence of opaque models becomes traceable; when convergence between the level populations, the radiation field, and the point separation has been obtained, the grid is ray-traced to produced images that can readily be compared to observations. LIME is particularly well suited for modeling of ALMA data because of the high dynamic range in scales that can be resolved using this type of grid, and can furthermore deal with overlapping lines of multiple molecular and atomic species.

CASA, the Common Astronomy Software Applications package, is being developed with the primary goal of supporting the data post-processing needs of the next generation of radio astronomical telescopes such as ALMA and EVLA. The package can process both interferometric and single dish data. The CASA infrastructure consists of a set of C++ tools bundled together under an iPython interface as a set of data reduction tasks. This structure provides flexibility to process the data via task interface or as a python script. In addition to the data reduction tasks, many post-processing tools are available for even more flexibility and special purpose reduction needs.

We describe an automatic, objective routine for analyzing the clumpy structure in a spectral line position-position-velocity data cube. The algorithm works by first contouring the data at a multiple of the rms noise of the observations, then searches for peaks of emission which locate the clumps, and then follows them down to lower intensities. No a proiri clump profile is assumed. By creating simulated data, we test the performance of the algorithm and show that a contour map most accurately depicts internal structure at a contouring interval equal to twice the rms noise of the map. Blending of clump emission leads to small errors in mass and size determinations and in severe cases can result in a number of clumps being misidentified as a single unit, flattening the measured clump mass spectrum. The algorithm is applied to two real data sets as an example of its use. The Rosette molecular cloud is a 'typical' star-forming cloud, but in the Maddalena molecular cloud high-mass star formation is completely absent. Comparison of the two clump lists generated by the algorithm show that on a one-to-one basis the clumps in the star-forming cloud have higher peak temperatures, higher average densities, and are more gravitationally bound than in the non-star-forming cloud. Collective properties of the clumps, such as temperature-size-line-width-mass relations appear very similar, however. Contrary to the initial results reported in a previous paper (Williams & Blitz 1993), we find that the current, more thoroughly tested analysis finds no significant difference in the clump mass spectrum of the two clouds.

The tool McLuster is an open source code that can be used to either set up initial conditions for N-body computations or, alternatively, to generate artificial star clusters for direct investigation. There are two different versions of the code, one basic version for generating all kinds of unevolved clusters (in the following called mcluster) and one for setting up evolved stellar populations at a given age. The former is completely contained in the C file main.c. The latter (dubbed mcluster_sse) is more complex and requires additional FORTRAN routines, namely the Single-Star Evolution (SSE) routines by Hurley, Pols & Tout (ascl:1303.015) that are provided with the McLuster code.

SIGPROC is a package designed to standardize the initial analysis of the many types of fast-sampled pulsar data. Currently recognized machines are the Wide Band Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP), the Penn State Pulsar Machine (PSPM), the Arecibo Observatory Fourier Transform Machine (AOFTM), the Berkeley Pulsar Processors (BPP), the Parkes/Jodrell 1-bit filterbanks (SCAMP) and the filterbank at the Ooty radio telescope (OOTY). The SIGPROC tools should help users look at their data quickly, without the need to write (yet) another routine to read data or worry about big/little endian compatibility (byte swapping is handled automatically).

PRESTO is a large suite of pulsar search and analysis software. It was primarily designed to efficiently search for binary millisecond pulsars from long observations of globular clusters (although it has since been used in several surveys with short integrations and to process a lot of X-ray data as well). To date, PRESTO has discovered well over a hundred and fifty pulsars, including approximately 100 recycled pulsars, about 80 of which are in binaries. It is written primarily in ANSI C, with many of the recent routines in Python.

Written with portability, ease-of-use, and memory efficiency in mind, it can currently handle raw data from the following pulsar machines or formats:

- PSRFITS search-format data (as from GUPPI at the GBT and the Mock Spectrometers at Arecibo)
- SPIGOT at the GBT
- Most Wideband Arecibo Pulsar Processor (WAPP) at Arecibo
- The Parkes and Jodrell Bank 1-bit filterbank formats
- Berkeley-Caltech Pulsar Machine (BCPM) at the GBT (may it RIP...)
- 8-bit filterbank format from SIGPROC (other formats will be added if required)
- A time series composed of single precision (i.e. 4-byte) floating point data
- Photon arrival times (or events) in ASCII or double-precision binary formats

HEALPix is an acronym for Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization of a sphere. As suggested in the name, this pixelization produces a subdivision of a spherical surface in which each pixel covers the same surface area as every other pixel. Another property of the HEALPix grid is that the pixel centers occur on a discrete number of rings of constant latitude, the number of constant-latitude rings is dependent on the resolution of the HEALPix grid.

PSRPOP is a package developed to model the Galactic population and evolution of radio pulsars. It is a collection of modules written in Fortran77 for an analysis of a large sample of pulsars detected by the Parkes Multibeam Pulsar Survey. The main programs are: 1.) populate, which creates a model Galaxy of pulsars distributed according according to various assumptions; 2.) survey, which searches the model galaxies generated using populate using realistic models of pulsar surveys; and 3.) visualize, a Tk/PGPLOT script to plot various aspects of model detected pulsars from survey. A sample screenshot from visualize can be found here.

AlterBBN evaluates the abundances of the elements generated by Big-Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN). This program computes the abundances of the elements in the standard model of cosmology and allows the user to alter the assumptions of the cosmological model to study their consequences on the abundances of the elements. In particular the baryon-to-photon ratio and the effective number of neutrinos, as well as the expansion rate and the entropy content of the Universe during BBN can be modified in AlterBBN. Such features allow the user to test the cosmological models by confronting them to BBN constraints.

PHOEBE (PHysics Of Eclipsing BinariEs) is a modeling package for eclipsing binary stars, built on top of the widely used WD program (Wilson & Devinney 1971). This introductory paper overviews most important scientific extensions (incorporating observational spectra of eclipsing binaries into the solution-seeking process, extracting individual temperatures from observed color indices, main-sequence constraining and proper treatment of the reddening), numerical innovations (suggested improvements to WD's Differential Corrections method, the new Nelder & Mead's downhill Simplex method) and technical aspects (back-end scripter structure, graphical user interface). While PHOEBE retains 100% WD compatibility, its add-ons are a powerful way to enhance WD by encompassing even more physics and solution reliability.

PLplot is a cross-platform software package for creating scientific plots. To help accomplish that task it is organized as a core C library, language bindings for that library, and device drivers which control how the plots are presented in non-interactive and interactive plotting contexts. The PLplot core library can be used to create standard x-y plots, semi-log plots, log-log plots, contour plots, 3D surface plots, mesh plots, bar charts and pie charts. Multiple graphs (of the same or different sizes) may be placed on a single page, and multiple pages are allowed for those device formats that support them. PLplot has core support for Unicode. This means for our many Unicode-aware devices that plots can be labelled using the enormous selection of Unicode mathematical symbols. A large subset of our Unicode-aware devices also support complex text layout (CTL) languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Indic and Indic-derived CTL scripts such as Devanagari, Thai, Lao, and Tibetan. PLplot device drivers support a number of different file formats for non-interactive plotting and a number of different platforms that are suitable for interactive plotting. It is easy to add new device drivers to PLplot by writing a small number of device dependent routines.

E3D is a package of tools for the analysis and visualization of IFS data. It is capable of reading, writing, and visualizing reduced data from 3D spectrographs of any kind.

R3D was developed to reduce fiber-based integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data. The package comprises a set of command-line routines adapted for each of these steps, suitable for creating pipelines. The routines have been tested against simulations, and against real data from various integral field spectrographs (PMAS, PPAK, GMOS, VIMOS and INTEGRAL). Particular attention is paid to the treatment of cross-talk.

R3D unifies the reduction techniques for the different IFS instruments to a single one, in order to allow the general public to reduce different instruments data in an homogeneus, consistent and simple way. Although still in its prototyping phase, it has been proved to be useful to reduce PMAS (both in the Larr and the PPAK modes), VIMOS and INTEGRAL data. The current version has been coded in Perl, using PDL, in order to speed-up the algorithm testing phase. Most of the time critical algorithms have been translated to C, and it is our intention to translate all of them. However, even in this phase R3D is fast enough to produce valuable science frames in reasonable time.

We describe an automated method for assigning the most probable physical parameters to the components of an eclipsing binary, using only its photometric light curve and combined colors. With traditional methods, one attempts to optimize a multi-parameter model over many iterations, so as to minimize the chi-squared value. We suggest an alternative method, where one selects pairs of coeval stars from a set of theoretical stellar models, and compares their simulated light curves and combined colors with the observations. This approach greatly reduces the parameter space over which one needs to search, and allows one to estimate the components' masses, radii and absolute magnitudes, without spectroscopic data. We have implemented this method in an automated program using published theoretical isochrones and limb-darkening coefficients. Since it is easy to automate, this method lends itself to systematic analyses of datasets consisting of photometric time series of large numbers of stars, such as those produced by OGLE, MACHO, TrES, HAT, and many others surveys.