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On Wednesday, Jim released v9r2p3 v9r3 of the Science Tools. Here are the differences from v9r2p2. The biggest news is that the new versions of the pulsar tools have been included (see below), but the release also includes important fixes (e.g., in gtburstfit) and enhancements (e.g., speed of gtselect - see below).
Emmanuel will make a MacOSX build (by hand) of v9r2p3v9r3.
Data products: No new news.
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Jim has worked out a filtering expression for gtselect and gtmktime that applies "zenith angle cuts to FT1 data without incurring additional excessive computational cost in the likelihood analysis." In general this is a combination of applying zenith angle cuts on FT1 files and also creating GTIs to remove time intervals when the horizon would cross the ROI (or source region). Depending on the pointing history and the zenith angle range of the ROI, the time ranges actually removed can be very small. Jim is working on evaluating and refining the approach.
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Jim also "made minor modifications to the SpectralTransient source class to allow for neutron components to be modeled in Solar Flare simulations."
And he "modified gtobssim to allow for the SAA to be disabled to support GRB sensitivity studies." This uses an environment variable DISABLE_SAA.
Max R. reports that he is working on the code for PulsarSpectrum to make it faster and more readable, and he is also extensively testing the code.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
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James reports that he "met with Bryan Irby and Eric Winter to discuss the status of the Science Tools port into the HEADAS build system. They determined a way forward in which the Science Tools would be treated architecturally exactly like all other current missions (Swift and Suzaku). The plan is still to distribute the Science Tools independently of the rest of HEADAS for the time being."
Source Catalog
Met this week. Jean presented results from comparisons of source lists from different source detection algorithms applied to the obssim2 data. Depending on region of the sky (low vs. high) and probably also the duration of the data set different algorithms perform best.
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