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Astrophysics Source Code Library

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Results 401-500 of 3437 (3348 ASCL, 89 submitted)

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[ascl:1202.007] CRUNCH3D: Three-dimensional compressible MHD code

CRUNCH3D is a massively parallel, viscoresistive, three-dimensional compressible MHD code. The code employs a Fourier collocation spatial discretization, and uses a second-order Runge-Kutta temporal discretization. CRUNCH3D can be applied to MHD turbulence and magnetic fluxtube reconnection research.

[ascl:1202.008] Chombo: Adaptive Solutions of Partial Differential Equations

Chombo provides a set of tools for implementing finite difference methods for the solution of partial differential equations on block-structured adaptively refined rectangular grids. Both elliptic and time-dependent modules are included. Chombo supports calculations in complex geometries with both embedded boundaries and mapped grids, and also supports particle methods. Most parallel platforms are supported, and cross-platform self-describing file formats are included.

The Chombo package is a product of the community of Collaborators working with the Applied Numerical Algorithms Group (ANAG), part of the Computational Research Division at LBNL.

[ascl:1202.009] MOOG: LTE line analysis and spectrum synthesis

MOOG performs a variety of LTE line analysis and spectrum synthesis tasks. The typical use of MOOG is to assist in the determination of the chemical composition of a star. The basic equations of LTE stellar line analysis are followed. The coding is in various subroutines that are called from a few driver routines; these routines are written in standard FORTRAN. The standard MOOG version has been developed on unix, linux and macintosh computers.

One of the chief assets of MOOG is its ability to do on-line graphics. The plotting commands are given within the FORTRAN code. MOOG uses the graphics package SM, chosen for its ease of implementation in FORTRAN codes. Plotting calls are concentrated in just a few routines, and it should be possible for users of other graphics packages to substitute other appropriate FORTRAN commands.

[ascl:1202.010] SPECTRE: Manipulation of single-order spectra

SPECTRE's chief purpose is the manipulation of single-order spectra, and it performs many of the tasks contained in such IRAF routines as "splot" and "rv". It is not meant to replace the much more general capabilities of IRAF, but does some functions in a manner that some might find useful. A brief list of SPECTRE tasks are: spectrum smoothing; equivalent width calculation; continuum rectification; noise spike excision; and spectrum comparison. SPECTRE was written to manipulate coude spectra, and thus is probably most useful for working on high dispersion spectra. Echelle spectra can be gathered from various observatories, reduced to singly-dimensioned spectra using IRAF, then written out as FITS files, thus becoming accessible to SPECTRE. Three different spectra may be manipulated and displayed simultaneously. SPECTRE, written in standard FORTRAN77, can be used only with the SM graphics package.

[ascl:1202.011] Lattimer-Swesty Equation of State Code

The Lattimer-Swesty Equation of State code is rapid enough to use directly in hydrodynamical simulations such as stellar collapse calculations. It contains an adjustable nuclear force that accurately models both potential and mean-field interactions and allows for the input of various nuclear parameters, including the bulk incompressibility parameter, the bulk and surface symmetry energies, the symmetric matter surface tension, and the nucleon effective masses. This permits parametric studies of the equation of state in astrophysical situations. The equation of state is modeled after the Lattimer, Lamb, Pethick, and Ravenhall (LLPR) compressible liquid drop model for nuclei, and includes the effects of interactions and degeneracy of the nucleon outside nuclei.

[ascl:1202.012] CoCoNuT: General relativistic hydrodynamics code with dynamical space-time evolution

CoCoNuT is a general relativistic hydrodynamics code with dynamical space-time evolution. The main aim of this numerical code is the study of several astrophysical scenarios in which general relativity can play an important role, namely the collapse of rapidly rotating stellar cores and the evolution of isolated neutron stars. The code has two flavors: CoCoA, the axisymmetric (2D) magnetized version, and CoCoNuT, the 3D non-magnetized version.

[ascl:1202.013] SME: Spectroscopy Made Easy

Spectroscopy Made Easy (SME) is IDL software and a compiled external library that fits an observed high-resolution stellar spectrum with a synthetic spectrum to determine stellar parameters. The SME external library is available for Mac, Linux, and Windows systems. Atomic and molecular line data formatted for SME may be obtained from VALD. SME can solve for empirical log(gf) and damping parameters, using an observed spectrum of a star (usually the Sun) as a constraint.

[ascl:1202.014] FISA: Fast Integrated Spectra Analyzer

FISA (Fast Integrated Spectra Analyzer) permits fast and reasonably accurate age and reddening determinations for small angular diameter open clusters by using their integrated spectra in the (3600-7400) AA range and currently available template spectrum libraries. This algorithm and its implementation help to achieve astrophysical results in shorter times than from other methods. FISA has successfully been applied to integrated spectroscopy of open clusters, both in the Galaxy and in the Magellanic Clouds, to determine ages and reddenings.

[ascl:1202.015] RADMC-3D: A multi-purpose radiative transfer tool

RADMC-3D is a software package for astrophysical radiative transfer calculations in arbitrary 1-D, 2-D or 3-D geometries. It is mainly written for continuum radiative transfer in dusty media, but also includes modules for gas line transfer and gas continuum transfer. RADMC-3D is a new incarnation of the older software package RADMC (ascl:1108.016).

[ascl:1203.001] AE: ACIS Extract

ACIS Extract (AE), written in the IDL language, provides innovative and automated solutions to the varied challenges found in the analysis of X-ray data taken by the ACIS instrument on NASA's Chandra observatory. AE addresses complications found in many Chandra projects: large numbers of point sources (hundreds to several thousand), faint point sources, misaligned multiple observations of an astronomical field, point source crowding, and scientifically relevant diffuse emission. AE can perform virtually all the data processing and analysis tasks that lie between Level 2 ACIS data and publishable LaTeX tables of point-like and diffuse source properties and spectral models.

[ascl:1203.002] GALAPAGOS: Galaxy Analysis over Large Areas: Parameter Assessment by GALFITting Objects from SExtractor

GALAPAGOS, Galaxy Analysis over Large Areas: Parameter Assessment by GALFITting Objects from SExtractor (ascl:1010.064), automates source detection, two-dimensional light-profile Sersic modelling and catalogue compilation in large survey applications. Based on a single setup, GALAPAGOS can process a complete set of survey images. It detects sources in the data, estimates a local sky background, cuts postage stamp images for all sources, prepares object masks, performs Sersic fitting including neighbours and compiles all objects in a final output catalogue. For the initial source detection GALAPAGOS applies SExtractor, while GALFIT (ascl:1104.010) is incorporated for modelling Sersic profiles. It measures the background sky involved in the Sersic fitting by means of a flux growth curve. GALAPAGOS determines postage stamp sizes based on SExtractor shape parameters. In order to obtain precise model parameters GALAPAGOS incorporates a complex sorting mechanism and makes use of multiplexing capabilities. It combines SExtractor and GALFIT data in a single output table. When incorporating information from overlapping tiles, GALAPAGOS automatically removes multiple entries from identical sources.

GALAPAGOS is programmed in the Interactive Data Language, IDL. A C implementation of the software, GALAPAGOS-C (ascl:1408.011), is available, and a multi-band Galapagos version is also available.

[ascl:1203.003] spec2d: DEEP2 DEIMOS Spectral Pipeline

The DEEP2 DEIMOS Data Reduction Pipeline ("spec2d") is an IDL-based, automated software package designed to reduce Keck/DEIMOS multi-slit spectroscopic observations, collected as part of the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey. The pipeline is best suited for handling data taken with the 1200 line/mm grating tilted towards the red (lambda_c ~ 7800Å). The spec2d reduction package takes the raw DEIMOS data as its input and produces a variety of outputs including 2-d slit spectra and 1-d object spectra.

[ascl:1203.004] FERENGI: Full and Efficient Redshifting of Ensembles of Nearby Galaxy Images

Bandpass shifting and the (1+z)5 surface brightness dimming (for a fixed width filter) make standard tools for the extraction of structural parameters of galaxies wavelength dependent. If only few (or one) observed high-res bands exist, this dependence has to be corrected to make unbiased statements on the evolution of structural parameters or on galaxy subsamples defined by morphology. FERENGI artificially redshifts low-redshift galaxy images to different redshifts by applying the correct cosmological corrections for size, surface brightness and bandpass shifting. A set of artificially redshifted galaxies in the range 0.1<z<1.1 using a set of ~100 SDSS low-redshift (v<7000 km s-1) images as input has been created to use as a training set of realistic images of galaxies of diverse morphologies and a large range of redshifts for the GEMS and COSMOS galaxy evolution projects. This training set allows other studies to investigate and quantify the effects of cosmological redshift on the determination of galaxy morphologies, distortions, and other galaxy properties that are potentially sensitive to resolution, surface brightness, and bandpass issues. The data sets are also available for download from the FERENGI website.

[ascl:1203.005] Gyoto: General relativitY Orbit Tracer of Observatoire de Paris

GYOTO, a general relativistic ray-tracing code, aims at computing images of astronomical bodies in the vicinity of compact objects, as well as trajectories of massive bodies in relativistic environments. This code is capable of integrating the null and timelike geodesic equations not only in the Kerr metric, but also in any metric computed numerically within the 3+1 formalism of general relativity. Simulated images and spectra have been computed for a variety of astronomical targets, such as a moving star or a toroidal accretion structure. The underlying code is open source and freely available. It is user-friendly, quickly handled and very modular so that extensions are easy to integrate. Custom analytical metrics and astronomical targets can be implemented in C++ plug-in extensions independent from the main code.

[ascl:1203.006] EMACSS: Evolve Me A Cluster of StarS

The star cluster evolution code Evolve Me A Cluster of StarS (EMACSS) is a simple yet physically motivated computational model that describes the evolution of some fundamental properties of star clusters in static tidal fields. The prescription is based upon the flow of energy within the cluster, which is a constant fraction of the total energy per half-mass relaxation time. According to Henon's predictions, this flow is independent of the precise mechanisms for energy production within the core, and therefore does not require a complete description of the many-body interactions therein. Dynamical theory and analytic descriptions of escape mechanisms is used to construct a series of coupled differential equations expressing the time evolution of cluster mass and radius for a cluster of equal-mass stars. These equations are numerically solved using a fourth-order Runge-Kutta integration kernel; the results were benchmarked against a data base of direct N-body simulations. EMACSS is publicly available and reproduces the N-body results to within ~10 per cent accuracy for the entire post-collapse evolution of star clusters.

[ascl:1203.007] EBTEL: Enthalpy-Based Thermal Evolution of Loops

Observational and theoretical evidence suggests that coronal heating is impulsive and occurs on very small cross-field spatial scales. A single coronal loop could contain a hundred or more individual strands that are heated quasi-independently by nanoflares. It is therefore an enormous undertaking to model an entire active region or the global corona. Three-dimensional MHD codes have inadequate spatial resolution, and 1D hydro codes are too slow to simulate the many thousands of elemental strands that must be treated in a reasonable representation. Fortunately, thermal conduction and flows tend to smooth out plasma gradients along the magnetic field, so "0D models" are an acceptable alternative. We have developed a highly efficient model called Enthalpy-Based Thermal Evolution of Loops (EBTEL) that accurately describes the evolution of the average temperature, pressure, and density along a coronal strand. It improves significantly upon earlier models of this type--in accuracy, flexibility, and capability. It treats both slowly varying and highly impulsive coronal heating; it provides the differential emission measure distribution, DEM(T), at the transition region footpoints; and there are options for heat flux saturation and nonthermal electron beam heating. EBTEL gives excellent agreement with far more sophisticated 1D hydro simulations despite using four orders of magnitude less computing time. It promises to be a powerful new tool for solar and stellar studies.

[ascl:1203.008] MegaLUT: Correcting ellipticity measurements of galaxies

MegaLUT is a simple and fast method to correct ellipticity measurements of galaxies from the distortion by the instrumental and atmospheric point spread function (PSF), in view of weak lensing shear measurements. The method performs a classification of galaxies and associated PSFs according to measured shape parameters, and builds a lookup table of ellipticity corrections by supervised learning. This new method has been applied to the GREAT10 image analysis challenge, and demonstrates a refined solution that obtains the highly competitive quality factor of Q = 142, without any power spectrum denoising or training. Of particular interest is the efficiency of the method, with a processing time below 3 ms per galaxy on an ordinary CPU.

[ascl:1203.009] MYRIAD: N-body code for simulations of star clusters

MYRIAD is a C++ code for collisional N-body simulations of star clusters. The code uses the Hermite fourth-order scheme with block time steps, for advancing the particles in time, while the forces and neighboring particles are computed using the GRAPE-6 board. Special treatment is used for close encounters, binary and multiple sub-systems that either form dynamically or exist in the initial configuration. The structure of the code is modular and allows the appropriate treatment of more physical phenomena, such as stellar and binary evolution, stellar collisions and evolution of close black-hole binaries. Moreover, it can be easily modified so that the part of the code that uses GRAPE-6 could be replaced by another module that uses other accelerating-hardware like the Graphics Processing Units (GPUs). Appropriate choice of the free parameters give a good accuracy and speed for simulations of star clusters up to and beyond core collapse. The code accuracy becomes comparable and even better than the accuracy of existing codes when a number of close binary systems is dynamically created in a simulation; this is due to the high accuracy of the method that is used for close binary and multiple sub-systems. The code can be used for evolving star clusters containing equal-mass stars or star clusters with an initial mass function (IMF) containing an intermediate mass black hole (IMBH) at the center and/or a fraction of primordial binaries, which are systems of particular astrophysical interest.

[ascl:1203.010] Youpi: YOUr processing PIpeline

Youpi is a portable, easy to use web application providing high level functionalities to perform data reduction on scientific FITS images. Built on top of various open source reduction tools released to the community by TERAPIX (http://terapix.iap.fr), Youpi can help organize data, manage processing jobs on a computer cluster in real time (using Condor) and facilitate teamwork by allowing fine-grain sharing of results and data. Youpi is modular and comes with plugins which perform, from within a browser, various processing tasks such as evaluating the quality of incoming images (using the QualityFITS software package), computing astrometric and photometric solutions (using SCAMP), resampling and co-adding FITS images (using SWarp) and extracting sources and building source catalogues from astronomical images (using SExtractor). Youpi is useful for small to medium-sized data reduction projects; it is free and is published under the GNU General Public License.

[ascl:1203.011] SALT2: Spectral Adaptive Lightcurve Template

SALT (Spectral Adaptive Lightcurve Template) is a package for Type Ia Supernovae light curve fitting. Its main purpose is to provide a distance estimator but it can also be used for photometric redshifts, and spectroscopic + photometric identification. This code is also known by the name snfit.

[ascl:1203.012] Astrometrica: Astrometric data reduction of CCD images

Astrometrica is an interactive software tool for scientific grade astrometric data reduction of CCD images. The current version of the software is for the Windows 32bit operating system family. Astrometrica reads FITS (8, 16 and 32 bit integer files) and SBIG image files. The size of the images is limited only by available memory. It also offers automatic image calibration (Dark Frame and Flat Field correction), automatic reference star identification, automatic moving object detection and identification, and access to new-generation star catalogs (PPMXL, UCAC 3 and CMC-14), in addition to online help and other features. Astrometrica is shareware, available for use for a limited period of time (100 days) for free; special arrangements can be made for educational projects.

[ascl:1203.013] Figaro: Data Reduction Software

Figaro (sometimes referred to as "standalone Figaro") is a data reduction system that originated at Caltech and whose development continued at the Anglo-Australian Observatory. Although it is intended to be able to deal with any sort of data, almost all its applications to date are geared towards processing optical and infrared data. Figaro uses hierarchical data structures to provide flexibility in its data file formats. Figaro was originally written to run under DEC's VMS operating system, but is now available both for VAX/VMS (by special request) and for various flavors of UNIX including Linux and MacOS.

A variant of Figaro (ascl:1411.022) is incorporated into the Starlink package (ascl:1110.012).

[ascl:1204.001] WM-basic: Modeling atmospheres of hot stars

WM-basic is an easy-to-use interface to a program package which models the atmospheres of Hot Stars (and also SN and GN). The release comprises all programs required to calculate model atmospheres which especially yield ionizing fluxes and synthetic spectra. WM-basic is a native 32-bit application, conforming to the Multiple Documents Interface (MDI) standards for Windows XP/2000/NT/9x. All components of the program package have been compiled with Digital Visual Fortran V6.6(Pro) and Microsoft Visual C++.

[ascl:1204.002] pyBLoCXS: Bayesian Low-Count X-ray Spectral analysis

pyBLoCXS is a sophisticated Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) based algorithm designed to carry out Bayesian Low-Count X-ray Spectral (BLoCXS) analysis in the Sherpa environment. The code is a Python extension to Sherpa that explores parameter space at a suspected minimum using a predefined Sherpa model to high-energy X-ray spectral data. pyBLoCXS includes a flexible definition of priors and allows for variations in the calibration information. It can be used to compute posterior predictive p-values for the likelihood ratio test. The pyBLoCXS code has been tested with a number of simple single-component spectral models; it should be used with great care in more complex settings.

[ascl:1204.003] BUDDA: BUlge/Disk Decomposition Analysis

Budda is a Fortran code developed to perform a detailed structural analysis on galaxy images. It is simple to use and gives reliable estimates of the galaxy structural parameters, which can be used, for instance, in Fundamental Plane studies. Moreover, it has a powerful ability to reveal hidden sub-structures, like inner disks, secondary bars and nuclear rings.

[ascl:1204.004] Fosite: 2D advection problem solver

Fosite implements a method for the solution of hyperbolic conservation laws in curvilinear orthogonal coordinates. It is written in Fortran 90/95 integrating object-oriented (OO) design patterns, incorporating the flexibility of OO-programming into Fortran 90/95 while preserving the efficiency of the numerical computation. Although mainly intended for CFD simulations, Fosite's modular design allows its application to other advection problems as well. Unlike other two-dimensional implementations of finite volume methods, it accounts for local conservation of specific angular momentum. This feature turns the program into a perfect tool for astrophysical simulations where angular momentum transport is crucial. Angular momentum transport is not only implemented for standard coordinate systems with rotational symmetry (i.e. cylindrical, spherical) but also for a general set of orthogonal coordinate systems allowing the use of exotic curvilinear meshes (e.g. oblate-spheroidal). As in the case of the advection problem, this part of the software is also kept modular, therefore new geometries may be incorporated into the framework in a straightforward manner.

[ascl:1204.005] MC3D: Monte-Carlo 3D Radiative Transfer Code

MC3D is a 3D continuum radiative transfer code; it is based on the Monte-Carlo method and solves the radiative transfer problem self-consistently. It is designed for the simulation of dust temperatures in arbitrary geometric configurations and the resulting observables: spectral energy distributions, wavelength-dependent images, and polarization maps. The main objective is the investigation of "dust-dominated" astrophysical systems such as young stellar objects surrounded by an optically thick circumstellar disk and an optically thin(ner) envelope, debris disks around more evolved stars, asymptotic giant branch stars, the dust component of the interstellar medium, and active galactic nuclei.

[ascl:1204.006] GRASIL: Spectral evolution of stellar systems with dust

GRASIL (which stands for GRAphite and SILicate) computes the spectral evolution of stellar systems taking into account the effects of dust, which absorbs and scatters optical and UV photons and emits in the IR-submm region. It may be used as well to do “standard” no-dust stellar spectral synthesis. The code is very well calibrated and applied to interpret galaxies at different redshifts. GRASIL can be downloaded or run online using the GALSYNTH WEB interface.

[ascl:1204.007] VH-1: Multidimensional ideal compressible hydrodynamics code

VH-1 is a multidimensional ideal compressible hydrodynamics code written in FORTRAN for use on any computing platform, from desktop workstations to supercomputers. It uses a Lagrangian remap version of the Piecewise Parabolic Method developed by Paul Woodward and Phil Colella in their 1984 paper. VH-1 comes in a variety of versions, from a simple one-dimensional serial variant to a multi-dimensional version scalable to thousands of processors.

[ascl:1204.008] StarFISH: For Inferring Star-formation Histories

StarFISH is a suite of programs designed to determine the star formation history (SFH) of a stellar population, given multicolor stellar photometry and a library of theoretical isochrones. It constructs a library of synthetic color-magnitude diagrams from the isochrones, which includes the effects of extinction, photometric errors and completeness, and binarity. A minimization routine is then used to determine the linear combination of synthetic CMDs that best matches the observed photometry. The set of amplitudes modulating each synthetic CMD describes the star formation history of the observed stellar population.

[ascl:1204.009] STOKES: Modeling Radiative Transfer and Polarization

STOKES was designed to perform three-dimensional radiative transfer simulations for astronomical applications. The code also considers the polarization properties of the radiation. The program is based on the Monte-Carlo method and treats optical and ultraviolet polarization induced by scattering off free electrons or dust grains. Emission and scattering regions can be arranged in various geometries within the model space, the computed continuum and line spectra can be evaluated at different inclinations and azimuthal viewing angles.

[ascl:1204.010] Shape: A 3D Modeling Tool for Astrophysics

Shape is a flexible interactive 3D morpho-kinematical modeling application for astrophysics. It reduces the restrictions on the physical assumptions, data type and amount required for a reconstruction of an object's morphology. It applies interactive graphics and allows astrophysicists to provide a-priori knowledge about the object by interactively defining 3D structural elements. By direct comparison of model prediction with observational data, model parameters can then be automatically optimized to fit the observation.

[ascl:1204.011] EXCOP: EXtraction of COsmological Parameters

The EXtraction of COsmological Parameters software (EXCOP) is a set of C and IDL programs together with a very large database of cosmological models generated by CMBFAST (ascl:9909.004) that will compute likelihood functions for cosmological parameters given some CMB data. This is the software and database used in the Stompor et al. (2001) analysis of a high resoultion Maxima1 CMB anisotropy map.

[ascl:1204.012] VirGO: A Visual Browser for the ESO Science Archive Facility

VirGO is the next generation Visual Browser for the ESO Science Archive Facility developed by the Virtual Observatory (VO) Systems Department. It is a plug-in for the popular open source software Stellarium adding capabilities for browsing professional astronomical data. VirGO gives astronomers the possibility to easily discover and select data from millions of observations in a new visual and intuitive way. Its main feature is to perform real-time access and graphical display of a large number of observations by showing instrumental footprints and image previews, and to allow their selection and filtering for subsequent download from the ESO SAF web interface. It also allows the loading of external FITS files or VOTables, the superimposition of Digitized Sky Survey (DSS) background images, and the visualization of the sky in a `real life' mode as seen from the main ESO sites. All data interfaces are based on Virtual Observatory standards which allow access to images and spectra from external data centers, and interaction with the ESO SAF web interface or any other VO applications supporting the PLASTIC messaging system.

[ascl:1204.013] ORSA: Orbit Reconstruction, Simulation and Analysis

ORSA is an interactive tool for scientific grade Celestial Mechanics computations. Asteroids, comets, artificial satellites, solar and extra-solar planetary systems can be accurately reproduced, simulated, and analyzed. The software uses JPL ephemeris files for accurate planets positions and has a Qt-based graphical user interface. It offers an advanced 2D plotting tool and 3D OpenGL viewer and the standalone numerical library liborsa and can import asteroids and comets from all the known databases (MPC, JPL, Lowell, AstDyS, and NEODyS). In addition, it has an integrated download tool to update databases.

[ascl:1204.014] WOMBAT: sWift Objects for Mhd BAsed on Tvd

WOMBAT (sWift Objects for Mhd BAsed on Tvd) is an astrophysical fluid code that is an implementation of a non-relativistic MHD TVD scheme; an extension for relativistic MHD has been added. The code operates on 1, 2, and 3D Eulerian meshes (cartesian and cylindrical coordinates) with magnetic field divergence restriction controlled by a constrained transport (CT) scheme. The user can tune code performance to a given processor based on chip cache sizes. Proper settings yield significant speed-ups due to efficient cache reuse.

[ascl:1204.015] PROFIT: Emission-line PROfile FITting routine

The PROFIT is an IDL routine to do automated fitting of emission-line profiles by Gaussian curves or Gauss-Hermite series optimized for use in Integral Field and Fabry-Perot data cubes. As output PROFIT gives two-dimensional FITS files for the emission-line flux distribution, centroid velocity, velocity dispersion and higher order Gauss-Hermite moments (h3 and h4).

[ascl:1204.016] ASCfit: Automatic Stellar Coordinate Fitting Package

A modular software package for automatically fitting astrometric world coordinates (WCS) onto raw optical or infrared FITS images. Image stars are identified with stars in a reference catalog (USNO-A2 or 2MASS), and coordinates derived as a simple linear transformation from (X,Y) pixels to (RA,DEC) to the accuracy level of the reference catalog used. The package works with both optical and infrared images, at sidereal and non-sidereal tracking rates.

[ascl:1204.017] epsnoise: Pixel noise in ellipticity and shear measurements

epsnoise simulates pixel noise in weak-lensing ellipticity and shear measurements. This open-source python code can efficiently create an intrinsic ellipticity distribution, shear it, and add noise, thereby mimicking a "perfect" measurement that is not affected by shape-measurement biases. For theoretical studies, we provide the Marsaglia distribution, which describes the ratio of normal variables in the general case of non-zero mean and correlation. We also added a convenience method that evaluates the Marsaglia distribution for the ratio of moments of a Gaussian-shaped brightness distribution, which gives a very good approximation of the measured ellipticity distribution also for galaxies with different radial profiles. We provide four shear estimators, two based on the ε ellipticity measure, two on χ. While three of them are essentially plain averages, we introduce a new estimator which requires a functional minimization.

[ascl:1205.001] Mechanic: Numerical MPI framework for dynamical astronomy

The Mechanic package is a numerical framework for dynamical astronomy, designed to help in massive numerical simulations by efficient task management and unified data storage. The code is built on top of the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Hierarchical Data Format (HDF5) standards and uses the Task Farm approach to manage numerical tasks. It relies on the core-module approach. The numerical problem implemented in the user-supplied module is separated from the host code (core). The core is designed to handle basic setup, data storage and communication between nodes in a computing pool. It has been tested on large CPU-clusters, as well as desktop computers. The Mechanic may be used in computing dynamical maps, data optimization or numerical integration.

[ascl:1205.002] p3d: General data-reduction tool for fiber-fed integral-field spectrographs

p3d is semi-automatic data-reduction tool designed to be used with fiber-fed integral-field spectrographs. p3d is a highly general and freely available tool based on IDL but can be used with full functionality without an IDL license. It is easily extended to include improved algorithms, new visualization tools, and support for additional instruments. It uses a novel algorithm for automatic finding and tracing of spectra on the detector, and includes two methods of optimal spectrum extraction in addition to standard aperture extraction. p3d also provides tools to combine several images, perform wavelength calibration and flat field data.

[ascl:1205.003] MIA+EWS: MIDI data reduction tool

MIA+EWS is a package of two data reduction tools for MIDI data which uses power-spectrum analysis or the information contained in the spectrally-dispersed fringe measurements in order to estimate the correlated flux and the visibility as function of wavelength in the N-band. MIA, which stands for MIDI Interactive Analysis, uses a Fast Fourier Transformation to calculate the Fourier amplitudes of the fringe packets to calculate the correlated flux and visibility. EWS stands for Expert Work-Station, which is a collection of IDL tools to apply coherent visibility analysis to reduce MIDI data. The EWS package allows the user to control and examine almost every aspect of MIDI data and its reduction. The usual data products are the correlated fluxes, total fluxes and differential phase.

[ascl:1205.004] Turbospectrum: Code for spectral synthesis

Turbospectrum is a 1D LTE spectrum synthesis code which covers 600 molecules, is fast with many lines, and uses the treatment of line broadening described by Barklem & O’Mara (1998).

[ascl:1205.005] Fv: Interactive FITS file editor

Fv is an easy-to-use graphical program for viewing and editing any FITS format image or table. The Fv software is small, completely self-contained and runs on Windows PCs, most Unix platforms and Mac OS-X. Fv also provides a portal into the Hera data analysis service from the HEASARC.

[ascl:1205.006] Flexion: IDL code for calculating gravitational flexion

Gravitational flexion is a technique for measuring 2nd order gravitational lensing signals in background galaxies and radio lobes. Unlike shear, flexion directly probes variations of the potential field. Moreover, the information contained in flexion is orthogonal to what is found in the shear. Thus, we get the information "for free."

[ascl:1205.007] Iris: The VAO SED Application

Iris is a downloadable Graphical User Interface (GUI) application which allows the astronomer to build and analyze wide-band Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs). The components of Iris have been contributed by members of the VAO. Specview, contributed by STScI, provides a GUI for reading, editing, and displaying SEDs, as well as defining models and parameter values. Sherpa, contributed by the Chandra project at SAO, provides a library of models, fit statistics, and optimization methods; the underlying I/O library, SEDLib, is a VAO product written by SAO to current IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance) data model standards. NED is a service provided by IPAC for easy location of data for a given extragalactic source, including SEDs. SedImporter converts non-standard SED data files into a format supported by Iris.

[ascl:1205.008] Mayavi2: 3D Scientific Data Visualization and Plotting

Mayavi provides general-purpose 3D scientific visualizations. It offers easy interactive tools for data visualization that fit with the scientific user's workflow. Mayavi provides several entry points: a full-blown interactive application; a Python library with both a MATLAB-like interface focused on easy scripting and a feature-rich object hierarchy; widgets associated with these objects for assembling in a domain-specific application, and plugins that work with a general purpose application-building framework.

[ascl:1205.009] ARES: Automatic Routine for line Equivalent widths in stellar Spectra

ARES was developed for the measurement of Equivalent Width of absortion lines in stellar spectra; it can also be used to determine fundamental spectroscopic stellar parameters.The code reads a 1D FITS spectra and fits the requested lines in order to calculate the Equivalent width. The code is written in C++ based on the standard method of determining EWs. It automates the manual procedure that one normally carries out when using interactive routines such as the splot routine implemented in IRAF.

[ascl:1205.010] Meudon PDR: Atomic & molecular structure of interstellar clouds

The Meudon PDR code computes the atomic and molecular structure of interstellar clouds. It can be used to study the physics and chemistry of diffuse clouds, photodissociation regions (PDRs), dark clouds, or circumstellar regions. The model computes the thermal balance of a stationary plane-parallel slab of gas and dust illuminated by a radiation field and takes into account heating processes such as the photoelectric effect on dust, chemistry, cosmic rays, etc. and cooling resulting from infrared and millimeter emission of the abundant species. Chemistry is solved for any number of species and reactions. Once abundances of atoms and molecules and level excitation of the most important species have been computed at each point, line intensities and column densities can be deduced.

[ascl:1205.011] VOSpec: VO Spectral Analysis Tool

VOSpec is a multi-wavelength spectral analysis tool with access to spectra, theoretical models and atomic and molecular line databases registered in the VO. The standard tools of VOSpec include line and continuum fitting, redshift and reddening correction, spectral arithmetic and convolution between spectra, equivalent width and flux calculations, and a best fitting algorithm for fitting selected SEDs to a TSAP service. VOSpec offers several display modes (tree vs table) and organising functionalities according to the available metadata for each service, including distance from the observation position.

[ascl:1206.001] RegiStax: Alignment, stacking and processing of images

RegiStax is software for alignment/stacking/processing of images; it was released over 10 years ago and continues to be developed and improved. The current version is RegiStax 6, which supports the following formats: AVI, SER, RFL (RegiStax Framelist), BMP, JPG, TIF, and FIT. This version has a shorter and simpler processing sequence than its predecessor, and optimizing isn't necessary anymore as a new image alignment method optimizes directly. The interface of RegiStax 6 has been simplified to look more uniform in appearance and functionality, and RegiStax 6 now uses Multi-core processing, allowing the user to have up to have multiple cores(recommended to use maximally 4) working simultaneous during alignment/stacking.

[ascl:1206.002] FITS Liberator: Image processing software

The ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator makes it possible to process and edit astronomical science data in the FITS format to produce stunning images of the universe. Formerly a plugin for Adobe Photoshop, the current version of FITS Liberator is a stand-alone application and no longer requires Photoshop. This image processing software makes it possible to create color images using raw observations from a range of telescopes; the FITS Liberator continues to support the FITS and PDS formats, preferred by astronomers and planetary scientists respectively, which enables data to be processed from a wide range of telescopes and planetary probes, including ESO’s Very Large Telescope, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, ESA’s XMM–Newton Telescope and Cassini–Huygens or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.

[ascl:1206.003] STSDAS: IRAF Tools for Hubble Space Telescope data reduction

The Space Telescope Science Data Analysis System (STSDAS) is a software package for reducing and analyzing astronomical data. It is layered on top of IRAF and provides general-purpose tools for astronomical data analysis as well as routines specifically designed for HST data. In particular, STSDAS contains all the programs used for the calibration and reduction of HST data in the STScI post-observation processing pipelines.

[ascl:1206.004] MOLSCAT: MOLecular SCATtering v. 14

MOLSCAT version 14 is a FORTRAN code for quantum mechanical (coupled channel) solution of the nonreactive molecular scattering problem and was developed to obtain collision rates for molecules in the interstellar gas which are needed to understand microwave and infrared astronomical observations. The code is implemented for various types of collision partners. In addition to the essentially exact close coupling method several approximate methods, including the Coupled States and Infinite Order Sudden approximations, are provided. This version of the code has been superseded by MOLSCAT 2020 (ascl:2010.001).

[ascl:1206.005] bhint: High-precision integrator for stellar systems

bhint is a post-Newtonian, high-precision integrator for stellar systems surrounding a super-massive black hole. The algorithm makes use of the fact that the Keplerian orbits in such a potential can be calculated directly and are only weakly perturbed. For a given average number of steps per orbit, bhint is almost a factor of 100 more accurate than the standard Hermite method.

[ascl:1206.006] statpl: Goodness-of-fit for power-law distributed data

statpl estimates the parameter of power-law distributed data and calculates goodness-of-fit tests for them. Many objects studied in astronomy follow a power-law distribution function (DF), for example the masses of stars or star clusters. Such data is often analyzed by generating a histogram and fitting a straight line to it. The parameters obtained in this way can be severely biased, and the properties of the underlying DF, such as its shape or a possible upper limit, are difficult to extract. statpl is an (effectively) bias-free estimator for the exponent and the upper limit.

[ascl:1206.007] Plumix: Generating mass segregated star clusters

Plumix is a small package for generating mass segregated star clusters. Its output can be directly used as input initial conditions for NBODY4 or NBODY6 code. Mass segregation stands as one of the most robust features of the dynamical evolution of self-gravitating star clusters. We formulate parametrized models of mass segregated star clusters in virial equilibrium. To this purpose we introduce mean inter-particle potentials for statistically described unsegregated systems and suggest a single-parameter generalization of its form which gives a mass-segregated state. Plumix is a numerical C-code generating the cluster according the algorithm given for construction of appropriate star cluster models. Their stability over several crossing-times is verified by following the evolution by means of direct N-body integration.

[ascl:1206.008] Catena: Ensemble of stars orbit integration

Catena integrates the orbits of an ensemble of stars using the chain-regularization method (Mikkola & Aarseth) with an embedded Runge-Kutta integration method of 9(8)th order (Prince & Dormand).

[ascl:1206.009] Libimf

Libimf provides a collection of programming functions based on the general IMF-algorithm by Pflamm-Altenburg & Kroupa (2006).

[ascl:1206.010] mkj_libs: Helper routines for plane-fitting & analysis tools

mkj_libs provides a set of helper routines (vector operations, astrometry, statistical analysis of spherical data) for the main plane-fitting and analysis tools.

[ascl:1206.011] Double Eclipsing Binary Fitting

The parameters of the mutual orbit of eclipsing binaries that are physically connected can be obtained by precision timing of minima over time through light travel time effect, apsidal motion or orbital precession. This, however, requires joint analysis of data from different sources obtained through various techniques and with insufficiently quantified uncertainties. In particular, photometric uncertainties are often underestimated, which yields too small uncertainties in minima timings if determined through analysis of a χ2 surface. The task is even more difficult for double eclipsing binaries, especially those with periods close to a resonance such as CzeV344, where minima get often blended with each other.

This code solves the double binary parameters simultaneously and then uses these parameters to determine minima timings (or more specifically O-C values) for individual datasets. In both cases, the uncertainties (or more precisely confidence intervals) are determined through bootstrap resampling of the original data. This procedure to a large extent alleviates the common problem with underestimated photometric uncertainties and provides a check on possible degeneracies in the parameters and the stability of the results. While there are shortcomings to this method as well when compared to Markov Chain Monte Carlo methods, the ease of the implementation of bootstrapping is a significant advantage.

[ascl:1206.012] Time Utilities

Time Utilities are software tools that, in principal, allow one to calculate BJD to a precision of 1 μs for any target from anywhere on Earth or from any spacecraft. As the quality and quantity of astrophysical data continue to improve, the precision with which certain astrophysical events can be timed becomes limited not by the data themselves, but by the manner, standard, and uniformity with which time itself is referenced. While some areas of astronomy (most notably pulsar studies) have required absolute time stamps with precisions of considerably better than 1 minute for many decades, recently new areas have crossed into this regime. In particular, in the exoplanet community, we have found that the (typically unspecified) time standards adopted by various groups can differ by as much as a minute. Left uncorrected, this ambiguity may be mistaken for transit timing variations and bias eccentricity measurements. We recommend using BJD_TDB, the Barycentric Julian Date in the Barycentric Dynamical Time standard for any astrophysical event. The BJD_TDB is the most practical absolute time stamp for extraterrestrial phenomena, and is ultimately limited by the properties of the target system. We compile a general summary of factors that must be considered in order to achieve timing precisions ranging from 15 minutes to 1 μs, and provide software for download and online webapps for use.

[ascl:1206.013] ImageJ: Image processing and analysis in Java

ImageJ is a public domain Java image processing program inspired by NIH Image. It can display, edit, analyze, process, save and print 8-bit, 16-bit and 32-bit images. It can read many image formats including TIFF, GIF, JPEG, BMP, DICOM, FITS and "raw". It supports "stacks", a series of images that share a single window. It is multithreaded, so time-consuming operations such as image file reading can be performed in parallel with other operations.

[ascl:1206.014] ImageHealth: Quality Assurance for Large FITS Images

ImageHealth (IH) is a c program that makes use of standard CFITSIO routines to examine, in an automated fashion, .FITS images with any number of extensions, find objects within those images, and determine basic parameters of those images (stellar flux, background counts, FWHM, and ellipticity, along with sky background counts) in order to provide a snapshot of the quality of those images. A variety of python wrappers have also been written to test large numbers of such images and compare the results of ImageHealth to other image analysis programs, such as SourceExtractor. Additional IH-related tools will be made available in the future.

[ascl:1207.001] EXOFAST: Fast transit and/or RV fitter for single exoplanet

EXOFAST is a fast, robust suite of routines written in IDL which is designed to fit exoplanetary transits and radial velocity variations simultaneously or separately, and characterize the parameter uncertainties and covariances with a Differential Evolution Markov Chain Monte Carlo method. Our code self-consistently incorporates both data sets to simultaneously derive stellar parameters along with the transit and RV parameters, resulting in consistent, but tighter constraints on an example fit of the discovery data of HAT-P-3b that is well-mixed in under two minutes on a standard desktop computer. EXOFAST has an easy-to-use online interface for several basic features of our transit and radial velocity fitting. A more robust version of EXOFAST, EXOFASTv2 (ascl:1710.003), is also available.

[ascl:1207.002] HiGPUs: Hermite's N-body integrator running on Graphic Processing Units

HiGPUs is an implementation of the numerical integration of the classical, gravitational, N-body problem, based on a 6th order Hermite’s integration scheme with block time steps, with a direct evaluation of the particle-particle forces. The main innovation of this code is its full parallelization, exploiting both OpenMP and MPI in the use of the multicore Central Processing Units as well as either Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) or OpenCL for the hosted Graphic Processing Units. We tested both performance and accuracy of the code using up to 256 GPUs in the supercomputer IBM iDataPlex DX360M3 Linux Infiniband Cluster provided by the italian supercomputing consortium CINECA, for values of N ≤ 8 millions. We were able to follow the evolution of a system of 8 million bodies for few crossing times, task previously unreached by direct summation codes.

HiGPUs is also available as part of the AMUSE project.

[ascl:1207.003] VAC: Versatile Advection Code

The Versatile Advection Code (VAC) is a freely available general hydrodynamic and magnetohydrodynamic simulation software that works in 1, 2 or 3 dimensions on Cartesian and logically Cartesian grids. VAC runs on any Unix/Linux system with a Fortran 90 (or 77) compiler and Perl interpreter. VAC can run on parallel machines using either the Message Passing Interface (MPI) library or a High Performance Fortran (HPF) compiler.

[ascl:1207.004] Hyperion: Parallelized 3D Dust Continuum Radiative Transfer Code

Hyperion is a three-dimensional dust continuum Monte-Carlo radiative transfer code that is designed to be as generic as possible, allowing radiative transfer to be computed through a variety of three-dimensional grids. The main part of the code is problem-independent, and only requires an arbitrary three-dimensional density structure, dust properties, the position and properties of the illuminating sources, and parameters controlling the running and output of the code. Hyperion is parallelized, and is shown to scale well to thousands of processes. Two common benchmark models for protoplanetary disks were computed, and the results are found to be in excellent agreement with those from other codes. Finally, to demonstrate the capabilities of the code, dust temperatures, SEDs, and synthetic multi-wavelength images were computed for a dynamical simulation of a low-mass star formation region.

[ascl:1207.005] L.A.Cosmic: Laplacian Cosmic Ray Identification

Conventional algorithms for rejecting cosmic rays in single CCD exposures rely on the contrast between cosmic rays and their surroundings and may produce erroneous results if the point-spread function is smaller than the largest cosmic rays. This code uses a robust algorithm for cosmic-ray rejection, based on a variation of Laplacian edge detection. The algorithm identifies cosmic rays of arbitrary shapes and sizes by the sharpness of their edges and reliably discriminates between poorly sampled point sources and cosmic rays. Examples of its performance are given for spectroscopic and imaging data, including Hubble Space Telescope Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 images, in the code paper.

[ascl:1207.006] dcr: Cosmic Ray Removal

This code provides a method for detecting cosmic rays in single images. The algorithm is based on a simple analysis of the histogram of the image data and does not use any modeling of the picture of the object. It does not require a good signal-to-noise ratio in the image data. Identification of multiple-pixel cosmic-ray hits is realized by running the procedure for detection and replacement iteratively. The method is very effective when applied to the images with spectroscopic data, and is also very fast in comparison with other single-image algorithms found in astronomical data-processing packages. Practical implementation and examples of application are presented in the code paper.

[ascl:1207.007] Astropysics: Astrophysics utilities for python

Astropysics is a library containing a variety of utilities and algorithms for reducing, analyzing, and visualizing astronomical data. Best of all, it encourages the user to leverage the existing capabilities of Python to make this quick, easy, and as painless as cutting-edge science can even actually be. There do exist other Python packages with some of the capabilities of this project, but the goal of this project is to integrate all these tools together and make them interact in the most straightforward ways possible.

[ascl:1207.008] xSonify: Sonification software

xSonify maps scientific data to acoustic sequences. Listening to data can help discover patterns in huge amounts of data. Written in Java, xSonify allows visually impaired people to examine numerical data for patterns. The data can be imported from local files or from remote databases via the Internet. Single results of measurements from spacecraft instruments can be selected by their corresponding variables in a specific time frame. The results are transformed into MIDI sequences which can be played with a selection of different instruments from a soundbank. Another software module enables xSonify to convert the sonified data into other sound formats to make it easier to archive and exchange the Sonification results with other scientists.

[ascl:1207.009] PyFITS: Python FITS Module

PyFITS provides an interface to FITS formatted files in the Python scripting language and PyRAF, the Python-based interface to IRAF. It is useful both for interactive data analysis and for writing analysis scripts in Python using FITS files as either input or output. PyFITS is a development project of the Science Software Branch at the Space Telescope Science Institute.

PyFITS has been deprecated. Please see Astropy.

[ascl:1207.010] PySALT: SALT science pipeline

The PySALT user package contains the primary reduction and analysis software tools for the SALT telescope. Currently, these tools include basic data reductions for RSS and SALTICAM in both imaging, spectroscopic, and slot modes. Basic analysis software for slot mode data is also provided. These tools are primarily written in python/PyRAF with some additional IRAF code.

[ascl:1207.011] PyRAF: Python alternative for IRAF

PyRAF is a command language for running IRAF tasks that is based on the Python scripting language. It gives users the ability to run IRAF tasks in an environment that has all the power and flexibility of Python. PyRAF can be installed along with an existing IRAF installation; users can then choose to run either PyRAF or the IRAF CL.

[ascl:1207.012] PCA: Principal Component Analysis for spectra modeling

The mid-infrared spectra of ultraluminous infrared galaxies (ULIRGs) contain a variety of spectral features that can be used as diagnostics to characterize the spectra. However, such diagnostics are biased by our prior prejudices on the origin of the features. Moreover, by using only part of the spectrum they do not utilize the full information content of the spectra. Blind statistical techniques such as principal component analysis (PCA) consider the whole spectrum, find correlated features and separate them out into distinct components.

This code, written in IDL, classifies principal components of IRS spectra to define a new classification scheme using 5D Gaussian mixtures modelling. The five PCs and average spectra for the four classifications to classify objects are made available with the code.

[ascl:1207.013] JKTEBOP: Analyzing light curves of detached eclipsing binaries

The JKTEBOP code is used to fit a model to the light curves of detached eclipsing binary stars in order to derive the radii of the stars as well as various other quantities. It is very stable and includes extensive Monte Carlo or bootstrapping error analysis algorithms. It is also excellent for transiting extrasolar planetary systems. All input and output is done by text files; JKTEBOP is written in almost-standard FORTRAN 77 using first the g77 compiler and now the ifort compiler.

[ascl:1207.014] wvrgcal: Correction of atmospheric phase fluctuations in ALMA observations

wvrgcal is a command line front end to LibAIR, the atmospheric inference library for phase correction of ALMA data using water vapour radiometers, and is the user-facing application for calculating atmospheric phase correction from WVR data. wvrgcal outputs a CASA gain calibration table which can then be applied to the observed data in the usual way.

Note: wvrgcal has been incorporated into the NRAO CASA suite.

[ascl:1208.001] Astrometry.net: Astrometric calibration of images

Astrometry.net is a reliable and robust system that takes as input an astronomical image and returns as output the pointing, scale, and orientation of that image (the astrometric calibration or World Coordinate System information). The system requires no first guess, and works with the information in the image pixels alone; that is, the problem is a generalization of the "lost in space" problem in which nothing—not even the image scale—is known. After robust source detection is performed in the input image, asterisms (sets of four or five stars) are geometrically hashed and compared to pre-indexed hashes to generate hypotheses about the astrometric calibration. A hypothesis is only accepted as true if it passes a Bayesian decision theory test against a null hypothesis. With indices built from the USNO-B catalog and designed for uniformity of coverage and redundancy, the success rate is >99.9% for contemporary near-ultraviolet and visual imaging survey data, with no false positives. The failure rate is consistent with the incompleteness of the USNO-B catalog; augmentation with indices built from the Two Micron All Sky Survey catalog brings the completeness to 100% with no false positives. We are using this system to generate consistent and standards-compliant meta-data for digital and digitized imaging from plate repositories, automated observatories, individual scientific investigators, and hobbyists.

[ascl:1208.002] BINSYN: Simulating Spectra and Light Curves of Binary Systems with or without Accretion Disks

The BINSYN program suite is a collection of programs for analysis of binary star systems with or without an optically thick accretion disk. BINSYN produces synthetic spectra of individual binary star components plus a synthetic spectrum of the system. If the system includes an accretion disk, BINSYN also produces a separate synthetic spectrum of the disk face and rim. A system routine convolves the synthetic spectra with filter profiles of several photometric standards to produce absolute synthetic photometry output. The package generates synthetic light curves and determines an optimized solution for system parameters.

[ascl:1208.003] APT: Aperture Photometry Tool

Aperture Photometry Tool (APT) is software for astronomers and students interested in manually exploring the photometric qualities of astronomical images. It has a graphical user interface (GUI) which allows the image data associated with aperture photometry calculations for point and extended sources to be visualized and, therefore, more effectively analyzed. Mouse-clicking on a source in the displayed image draws a circular or elliptical aperture and sky annulus around the source and computes the source intensity and its uncertainty, along with several commonly used measures of the local sky background and its variability. The results are displayed and can be optionally saved to an aperture-photometry-table file and plotted on graphs in various ways using functions available in the software. APT is geared toward processing sources in a small number of images and is not suitable for bulk processing a large number of images, unlike other aperture photometry packages (e.g., SExtractor). However, APT does have a convenient source-list tool that enables calculations for a large number of detections in a given image. The source-list tool can be run either in automatic mode to generate an aperture photometry table quickly or in manual mode to permit inspection and adjustment of the calculation for each individual detection. APT displays a variety of useful graphs, including image histogram, and aperture slices, source scatter plot, sky scatter plot, sky histogram, radial profile, curve of growth, and aperture-photometry-table scatter plots and histograms. APT has functions for customizing calculations, including outlier rejection, pixel “picking” and “zapping,” and a selection of source and sky models. The radial-profile-interpolation source model, accessed via the radial-profile-plot panel, allows recovery of source intensity from pixels with missing data and can be especially beneficial in crowded fields.

[ascl:1208.004] PyKE: Reduction and analysis of Kepler Simple Aperture Photometry data

PyKE is a python-based PyRAF package that can also be run as a stand-alone program within a unix-based shell without compiling against PyRAF. It is a group of tasks developed for the reduction and analysis of Kepler Simple Aperture Photometry (SAP) data of individual targets with individual characteristics. The main purposes of these tasks are to i) re-extract light curves from manually-chosen pixel apertures and ii) cotrend and/or detrend the data in order to reduce or remove systematic noise structure using methods tunable to user and target-specific requirements. PyKE is an open source project and contributions of new tasks or enhanced functionality of existing tasks by the community are welcome.

[ascl:1208.005] PSM: Planck Sky Model

The Planck Sky Model (PSM) is a global representation of the multi-component sky at frequencies ranging from a few GHz to a few THz. It summarizes in a synthetic way as much of our present knowledge as possible of the GHz sky. PSM is a complete and versatile set of programs and data that can be used for the simulation or the prediction of sky emission in the frequency range of typical CMB experiments, and in particular of the Planck sky mission. It was originally developed as part of the activities of Planck component separation Working Group (or "Working Group 2" - WG2), and of the ADAMIS team at APC.

PSM gives users the opportunity to investigate the model in some depth: look at its parameters, visualize its predictions for all individual components in various formats, simulate sky emission compatible with a given parameter set, and observe the modeled sky with a synthetic instrument. In particular, it makes possible the simulation of sky emission maps as could be plausibly observed by Planck or other CMB experiments that can be used as inputs for the development and testing of data processing and analysis techniques.

[ascl:1208.006] ccogs: Cosmological Calculations on the GPU

This suite contains two packages for computing cosmological quantities on the GPU: aperture_mass, which calculates the aperture mass map for a given dataset using the filter proposed by Schirmer et al (2007) (an NFW profile with exponential cut-offs at zero and large radii), and angular_correlation, which calculates the 2-pt angular correlation function using data and a flat distribution of randomly generated galaxies. A particular estimator is chosen, but the user has the flexibility to explore other estimators.

[ascl:1208.007] Big MACS: Accurate photometric calibration

Big MACS is a Python program that estimates an accurate photometric calibration from only an input catalog of stellar magnitudes and filter transmission functions. The user does not have to measure color terms which can be difficult to characterize. Supplied with filter transmission functions, Big MACS synthesizes an expected stellar locus for your data and then simultaneously solves for all unknown zeropoints when fitting to the instrumental locus. The code uses a spectroscopic model for the SDSS stellar locus in color-color space and filter functions to compute expected locus. The stellar locus model is corrected for Milky Way reddening. If SDSS or 2MASS photometry is available for stars in field, Big MACS can yield a highly accurate absolute calibration.

[ascl:1208.008] TiRiFiC: Tilted Ring Fitting Code

Tilted Ring Fitting Code (TiRiFiC) is a prototype computer program to construct simulated (high-resolution) astronomical spectroscopic 3d-observations (data cubes) of simple kinematical and morphological models of rotating (galactic) disks. It is possible to automatically optimize the parameterizations of constructed model disks to fit spectroscopic (3d-) observations via a χ2 minimization. TiRiFiC is currently implemented as an add-on to the Groningen Image Processing System (GIPSY) software package and attempts to provide a method to automatically fit an extended tilted-ring model directly to a data cube.

[ascl:1208.009] BLOBCAT: Software to Catalog Blobs

BLOBCAT is a source extraction software that utilizes the flood fill algorithm to detect and catalog blobs, or islands of pixels representing sources, in 2D astronomical images. The software is designed to process radio-wavelength images of both Stokes I intensity and linear polarization, the latter formed through the quadrature sum of Stokes Q and U intensities or as a by-product of rotation measure synthesis. BLOBCAT corrects for two systematic biases to enable the flood fill algorithm to accurately measure flux densities for Gaussian sources. BLOBCAT exhibits accurate measurement performance in total intensity and, in particular, linear polarization, and is particularly suited to the analysis of large survey data.

[ascl:1208.010] BASE: Bayesian Astrometric and Spectroscopic Exoplanet Detection and Characterization Tool

BASE is a novel program for the combined or separate Bayesian analysis of astrometric and radial-velocity measurements of potential exoplanet hosts and binary stars. The tool fulfills two major tasks of exoplanet science, namely the detection of exoplanets and the characterization of their orbits. BASE was developed to provide the possibility of an integrated Bayesian analysis of stellar astrometric and Doppler-spectroscopic measurements with respect to their binary or planetary companions’ signals, correctly treating the astrometric measurement uncertainties and allowing to explore the whole parameter space without the need for informative prior constraints. The tool automatically diagnoses convergence of its Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC[2]) sampler to the posterior and regularly outputs status information. For orbit characterization, BASE delivers important results such as the probability densities and correlations of model parameters and derived quantities. BASE is a highly configurable command-line tool developed in Fortran 2008 and compiled with GFortran. Options can be used to control the program’s behaviour and supply information such as the stellar mass or prior information. Any option can be supplied in a configuration file and/or on the command line.

[ascl:1208.011] Fewbody: Numerical toolkit for simulating small-N gravitational dynamics

Fewbody is a numerical toolkit for simulating small-N gravitational dynamics. It is a general N-body dynamics code, although it was written for the purpose of performing scattering experiments, and therefore has several features that make it well-suited for this purpose. Fewbody uses the 8th-order Runge-Kutta Prince-Dormand integration method with 9th-order error estimate and adaptive timestep to advance the N-body system forward in time. It integrates the usual formulation of the N-body equations in configuration space, but allows for the option of global pairwise Kustaanheimo-Stiefel (K-S) regularization (Heggie 1974; Mikkola 1985). The code uses a binary tree algorithm to classify the N-body system into a set of independently bound hierarchies, and performs collisions between stars in the “sticky star” approximation. Fewbody contains a collection of command line utilities that can be used to perform individual scattering and N-body interactions, but is more generally a library of functions that can be used from within other codes.

[ascl:1208.012] Swarm-NG: Parallel n-body Integrations

Swarm-NG is a C++ library for the efficient direct integration of many n-body systems using highly-parallel Graphics Processing Units (GPU). Swarm-NG focuses on many few-body systems, e.g., thousands of systems with 3...15 bodies each, as is typical for the study of planetary systems; the code parallelizes the simulation, including both the numerical integration of the equations of motion and the evaluation of forces using NVIDIA's "Compute Unified Device Architecture" (CUDA) on the GPU. Swarm-NG includes optimized implementations of 4th order time-symmetrized Hermite integration and mixed variable symplectic integration as well as several sample codes for other algorithms to illustrate how non-CUDA-savvy users may themselves introduce customized integrators into the Swarm-NG framework. Applications of Swarm-NG include studying the late stages of planet formation, testing the stability of planetary systems and evaluating the goodness-of-fit between many planetary system models and observations of extrasolar planet host stars (e.g., radial velocity, astrometry, transit timing). While Swarm-NG focuses on the parallel integration of many planetary systems,the underlying integrators could be applied to a wide variety of problems that require repeatedly integrating a set of ordinary differential equations many times using different initial conditions and/or parameter values.

[ascl:1208.013] SolarSoft: Programming and data analysis environment for solar physics

SolarSoft is a set of integrated software libraries, data bases, and system utilities which provide a common programming and data analysis environment for Solar Physics. The SolarSoftWare (SSW) system is built from Yohkoh, SOHO, SDAC and Astronomy libraries and draws upon contributions from many members of those projects. It is primarily an IDL based system, although some instrument teams integrate executables written in other languages. The SSW environment provides a consistent look and feel at widely distributed co-investigator institutions to facilitate data exchange and to stimulate coordinated analysis. Commonalities and overlap in solar data and analysis goals are exploited to permit application of fundamental utilities to the data from many different solar instruments. The use of common libraries, utilities, techniques and interfaces minimizes the learning curve for investigators who are analyzing new solar data sets, correlating results from multiple experiments or performing research away from their home institution.

[ascl:1208.014] MPI-AMRVAC: MPI-Adaptive Mesh Refinement-Versatile Advection Code

MPI-AMRVAC is an MPI-parallelized Adaptive Mesh Refinement code, with some heritage (in the solver part) to the Versatile Advection Code or VAC, initiated by Gábor Tóth at the Astronomical Institute at Utrecht in November 1994, with help from Rony Keppens since 1996. Previous incarnations of the Adaptive Mesh Refinement version of VAC were of restricted use only, and have been used for basic research in AMR strategies, or for well-targeted applications. This MPI version uses a full octree block-based approach, and allows for general orthogonal coordinate systems. MPI-AMRVAC aims to advance any system of (primarily hyperbolic) partial differential equations by a number of different numerical schemes. The emphasis is on (near) conservation laws, with shock-dominated problems as a main research target. The actual equations are stored in separate modules, can be added if needed, and they can be selected by a simple configuration of the VACPP preprocessor. The dimensionality of the problem is also set through VACPP. The numerical schemes are able to handle discontinuities and smooth flows as well.

[ascl:1208.015] Lare3d: Lagrangian-Eulerian remap scheme for MHD

Lare3d is a Lagrangian-remap code for solving the non-linear MHD equations in three spatial dimensions.

[ascl:1208.016] VARTOOLS: Light Curve Analysis Program

The VARTOOLS program is a command line utility that provides tools for analyzing time series astronomical data. It implements a number of routines for calculating variability/periodicity statistics of light curves, as well as tools for modifying and filtering light curves.

[ascl:1208.017] APLpy: Astronomical Plotting Library in Python

APLpy (the Astronomical Plotting Library in Python) is a Python module for producing publication-quality plots of astronomical imaging data in FITS format. The module uses Matplotlib, a powerful and interactive plotting package. It is capable of creating output files in several graphical formats, including EPS, PDF, PS, PNG, and SVG. Plots can be made interactively or by using scripts, and can generate co-aligned FITS cubes to make three-color RGB images. It also offers different overlay capabilities, including contour sets, markers with customizable symbols, and coordinate grids, and a range of other useful features.

[ascl:1208.018] CUBEP3M: High performance P3M N-body code

CUBEP3M is a high performance cosmological N-body code which has many utilities and extensions, including a runtime halo finder, a non-Gaussian initial conditions generator, a tuneable accuracy, and a system of unique particle identification. CUBEP3M is fast, has a memory imprint up to three times lower than other widely used N-body codes, and has been run on up to 20,000 cores, achieving close to ideal weak scaling even at this problem size. It is well suited and has already been used for a broad number of science applications that require either large samples of non-linear realizations or very large dark matter N-body simulations, including cosmological reionization, baryonic acoustic oscillations, weak lensing or non-Gaussian statistics.

[ascl:1208.019] MPFIT: Robust non-linear least squares curve fitting

These IDL routines provide a robust and relatively fast way to perform least-squares curve and surface fitting. The algorithms are translated from MINPACK-1, which is a rugged minimization routine found on Netlib, and distributed with permission. This algorithm is more desirable than CURVEFIT because it is generally more stable and less likely to crash than the brute-force approach taken by CURVEFIT, which is based upon Numerical Recipes.

[ascl:1208.020] ParselTongue: AIPS Python Interface

ParselTongue is a Python interface to classic AIPS, Obit and possibly other task-based data reduction packages. It serves as the software infrastructure for some of the ALBUS implementation. It allows you to run AIPS tasks, and access AIPS headers and extension tables from Python. There is also support for running Obit tasks and accessing data in FITS files. Full access to the visibilities in AIPS UV data is also available.

[ascl:1208.021] EzGal: A Flexible Interface for Stellar Population Synthesis Models

EzGal is a flexible Python program which generates observable parameters (magnitudes, colors, and mass-to-light ratios) for arbitrary input stellar population synthesis (SPS) models; it enables simple, direct comparison of different model sets so that the uncertainty introduced by choice of model set can be quantified. EzGal is also capable of generating composite stellar population models (CSPs) for arbitrary input star-formation histories and reddening laws, and can be used to interpolate between metallicities for a given model set.

[ascl:1209.001] Bayesian Blocks: Detecting and characterizing local variability in time series

Bayesian Blocks is a time-domain algorithm for detecting localized structures (bursts), revealing pulse shapes within bursts, and generally characterizing intensity variations. The input is raw time series data, in almost any form. Three data modes are elaborated: (1) time-tagged events, (2) binned counts, and (3) measurements at arbitrary times with normal errors. The output is the most probable segmentation of the observation interval into sub-intervals during which the signal is perceptibly constant, i.e. has no statistically significant variations. The idea is not that the source is deemed to actually have this discontinuous, piecewise constant form, rather that such an approximate and generic model is often useful. Treatment of data gaps, variable exposure, extension to piecewise linear and piecewise exponential representations, multi-variate time series data, analysis of variance, data on the circle, other data modes, and dispersed data are included.

This implementation is exact and replaces the greedy, approximate, and outdated algorithm implemented in BLOCK.

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