Thursday, August 18, 2011

Contrast Curve Function 2.0 III and Point Source Detector


So it turns out that actually, because of various factors like dithering and such, my contrast curves are probably correct.
...
Yay! That's actually pretty exciting stuff.

However, now my point source detector is far too insensitive. I am trying to search for regions that have point sources, and then use the fitgaussian(...) function to detect those point sources. However, the fitgaussian(...) runs very slowly over large arrays and doesn't seem to be all that effective at pinpointing the point sources. Even after I've put down an artificial point source, it still doesn't detect anything in any of the regions. Perhaps it's the way I've implemented it, and I just have to keep working towards a solution.

Learned:
-What dithering means.
To-Do:
-Find a way to make my point source detector work correctly, whether by using the fit gaussian function, or some other function.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Contrast Curve Function v2.0 II

I finished the new contrastcurve(...) function today.


def contrastcurve(self,ann_space=0,darkpix=0.95,thresh=5): Returns list of radii and corresponding noise (thresh*sigma+mean background noise) and point sources (if any). It detects point sources by fitting gaussians over regions that have, on average, greater intensity than the noise and searches for peaks in those regions.


And it........... still doesn't work right. 


Here's an example though, of what the contrast curve looks like for KIC109:

Interestingly, however, if I calculate magnitude using log instead of log base 10, I get this result:



This agrees much more closely with Justin's data. Weird! I still haven't figured out why. 


By the way, Justin's data is this:
KIC109   3.7, 5.6, 7.8, 8.6, 8.6  at 0.25'', 0.5'', 1'', 2'', 4'' respectively.
(This is for thresh=3; mine are produced with thresh=5, but I ran the code again and this barely makes any difference). 


To-Do:
-Start testing how my code behaves around images with bright point sources (yes I said I would do this today, but then the contrast curves looked funny...) while I try to figure out why my contrast curves are behaving this way.
Learned:
-I actually learned something interesting today: If you have a function that returns multiple things in an array, it's much more efficient to do thing1, thing2, thing3=function() 
as opposed to thing1, thing2 = function()[0], function[1] even if you only want to save thing1 and thing2. This is probably because in the first case, Python will run the function once and save the corresponding variables, whereas in the second case, Python will run the function once, save the 0th element, and then run the function again and save the first. So I guess that ultimately what I learned is that if you have a function that takes a while to run, it's better to use the first case to save time, but if you have a function that's relatively fast for large amounts of data, but that returns a bunch of stuff, it's better to use the second case to save memory. If you have a slow function that returns lots of data.... well then good luck to you.

Monday, August 15, 2011

Contrast Curve Function v2.0 I

Today I finished most of the contrast curve function I talked about in my previous post. I haven't gotten it to return a list of detected point sources yet (it only returns radii and respective 5*sigma as of now), but it should integrate relatively well into all the other code I've written so far.

I have also been given a rough timeline of what I'm supposed to do for the rest of the summer (yes, although officially ten weeks, my project will continue till the end of summer/beginning of the fall term). So here it is:

Goals:
1) Rewrite my code and try and get the same results that Justin did.
2) Start using my code for all the fits files I have.
3) Detect problems and check them.
4) Repeat as necessary (This is not a fun step).
5) Make my code more user-friendly.
6) At some point start putting contrast curves up on a website.
.
.
.
n) Somehow help with the writing of a paper.

To-Do:
-Tomorrow I'll have to figure out how this new contrast curve function will actually detect point sources. Since we're talking about regions now, I might have to also change the way the program points out detected sources to the user.
-I also have to start writing code so that I can upload directories of .FITS files into the program. That way, the user won't have to spend a long time typing in the names of all the .FITS images.
-At some point I'll have to see what I can do about adapting my program to various arcsecond/pixel ratio. That is, I want my program to be able to recognize a type of image by its file name and automatically assign the correct arcsecond/pixel ratio.
-Finally, if possible/not too aesthetically ugly, I should try and make all the pictures axes display units in terms of arcseconds instead of pixels.