Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r10.
Eric Winter has sent some news regarding the FSSC distribution of Science Tools. Their distribution is based on v9r8p2. They are getting feedback (bug reports so far related to the FSSC distributions only). The list of platforms they are supporting with binary distributions is growing:
SL 4.4 32-bit
SL 4.4 64-bit
SL 5.2 32-bit
SL 5.2 64-bit
OS X 10.4 PPC
OS X 10.4 Intel
OS X 10.5 PPC
OS X 10.5 Intel
CentOS 5.2 32-bit
Debian 5.0 32-bit
Fedora 10.0 32-bit
OpenSUSE 11.1 32-bit
Ubuntu 8.04 32-bit
Ubtuntu 8.10 32-bit
Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit
Ubtuntu 8.10 64-bit
See the Science Tools update for Feb. 10 for a link to the distribution page at the FSSC.
Data products: No new news about reprocessing.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim is maintaining a kind of diary of Likelihood Usage Notes that you should pay attention to. The updates for this week relate to likelihood analysis with diffuse sources. pyLikelihood can now provide fluxes, energy fluxes, and upper limits for diffuse sources. Also, the diffuse response calculation (gtdiffrsp) is now accurate for discrete diffuse sources defined via spatial templates. The user needs to take care to make the image size commensurate with the diffuse source. These updates are in Likelihood v14r3 and pyLikelihood v1r10p1 (not yet in a release).
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Last week most of the discussion was related to the generation of the 6-month source list that Jean is starting to undertake.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r10. Nico Giglietto has reported a problem with installing rh9_gcc32 and rh9_gcc32opt builds of this release - under investigation; Navid reports that it is probably just a download error.
Data products: No new news about reprocessing. Jean has recommended that the data products include the version of the Science Tools that generated them; this may be a use for the CREATOR keyword that is part of the specification.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news - Masa is working on improvements to the documentation for the pulsar tools.
Observation simulation
From Jim: "Since gtobssim doesn't make use of the magnetic coordinate-related quantities computed in the astro::EarthCoordinate class, I asked Leon to modify that class so that the IGRField::compute(...) function is not called unless those quantities are explicitly requested. As a result of these changes, gtobssim runs about a factor of 3 faster. (astro v3r7p1, ST HEAD1.717)"
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Source variability was the topic last week. Toby also described an investigation of the shapes of source location regions. Gino presented a first look at the 6-month sources.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is v9r10. Here are the differences from v9r9. This is an incremental release but if you are a user of likelihood you will want to switch to the new release.
The first public distribution of the Science Tools was released on Feb. 6 by the FSSC. You will see that they have binary distributions for several versions of Linux and Mac OS X. Eric W. reports that Ubuntu builds have also just been made. The FSSC distribution is based on v9r8p2 of the Science Tools; the public distribution is a subset of the packages of our builds.
Data products: No new news about reprocessing
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
v9r10 includes Steve Fegan's speed-up of the evaluations of the likelihood function. Speed-ups seem to be by a factor of ~2. This is really like something for nothing, and Jim points out that it should be especially noticeable in gtfindsrc.
Jim reports that it also includes the fix for the gtsrcmaps offset issue found by Jean Ballet, who found that the diffuse model for the Galactic plane was displaced by ~0.5 pixel after convolution in gtsrcmaps.
And he reports that v9r10 addresses interface requests from Jean for pyLikelihood. This includes allowing users to select plot colors and line styles.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news - Masa is still working on other FSSC tasks.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Jim points out that v9r10 includes a new version of the tip package that allows large (>2^31 row) FITS tables, if you want to use files that large. This is not currently working on the Windows builds.
Jim also points out that v9r10 includes handling of phi-dependence of IRFs in irfs/latResponse and irfs/handoff_response. Azimuth dependence is not currently included in IRFs distributed with the Science Tools, or in the evaluation of livetime cubes, but that is coming.
Source Catalog
The Bright Source List paper is out and the main table is available in various forms from the FSSC.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r9. The first public distribution of the Science Tools will be released on Feb. 6 by the FSSC. I believe that these are based on v9r8p2 of the Science Tools; the public distribution is a subset of the packages of our builds. Again, the FSSC distributions will support a wider variety of platforms.
Data products: Still not much news about the reprocessing; Tom G. is implementing and testing a pipeline task for reprocessing (at the Merit level, I believe) for Pass 7.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news - Masa has been working on other FSSC-based tasks over the last week.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
In the C&A meeting yesterday, Riccardo gave an update on Pass 6 v3 IRFs, which will include phi dependence of the effective area (at least).
Source Catalog
Bright Source List day and night.