[Updated March 5 with Pulsar Tools news]
Science Tools Working Group
As of Feb. 26, the current release of the Science Tools is v9r16p0. Here is the Release Manager summary of the package differences from v9r15p6. The new release incorporates updates that have been described in previous Science Tools Updates. Here are some highlights:
- Jim's fix for the problems with convolutions in binned likelihood analysis;
- The P6_V8 IRFs that Toby has implemented with the in-flight PSF that he measured; P6_V8 also incorporates the corrected fits and representation of the PSF that has been in the works for a while, dating to Matthew Kerr's study in the fall. The P6_V8 IRFs are now more conveniently available for further evaluation in analyses;
- gtselect now allows INDEF as a response to (some) prompts, indicating that the tool should read the parameters from the DS keywords already in the header. For example, if you have retrieved an FT1 file that already has a region-of-the-sky selection but want to make some subselection with gtselect (say on time range) you do not need to enter the center and radius again;
- If you use the Release Manager builds, note that it is no longer building rh9_gcc32 versions, just rhel4_gcc34, rhel4_gcc34opt, VC8, and VC8debug versions;
- Pulsar tools have some useful updates; see below.
Data products: No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. Johann has volunteered to write up the issues regarding the convolutions in binned likelihood analyses. Jim's fixes definitely correct the problem, but users should be aware of how the convolutions are done. Considerations include the geometries of the counts and diffuse model maps, and even whether they have odd or even numbers of pixels along each axis.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Summary of updates in v9r16p0 from Masa:
1) Introduce tolerance of 1 millisecond at boundaries of FT2 time coverage.
2) Introduce psrdbfile=NONE, with which no pulsar database file needs to be given to the pulsar tool.
3) Improve text outputs of gtephem for clarity, especially when no ephemeris is found for a given condition.
4) Improve errors and warnings in ephemeris sub-selection.
5) Fixed a bug in time computations on 64-bit machines.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r15p6. Jim has made a new HEAD build and an incremental release is likely by ~Wednesday. Among other updates, it will have the P6_V8 IRFs that Toby has implemented with the in-flight PSF that he measured; this version also has the corrected fits/representation of the IRF that has been in the works for a while, dating to Matthew Kerr's study in the fall. Incorporating the P6_V8 will make them more conveniently available for further evaluation in analyses.
The development news below describes updates that are not yet in a release.
Data products: Elizabeth F.'s updated documentation of the contents of the main data products served at the FSSC (FT1, 'extended FT1', and FT2) is now available.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- Likelihood v16r2p1: Problems with the convolutions with the binned analysis (i.e., slight sub-pixel shifts of the convolved images relative to the model images) reported by Mizuno, Luigi and their colleagues have been fixed. [These issues involved subtleties of the representations of images and of the PSF. Johann has volunteered to make a write up.]
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: Nothing in the pulsar tools development. We are discussing a possibility of expanding the D4 definition to accommodate more complex radio ephemerides, but a conclusion has not yet been reached.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r15p6. The development news below describes updates that are not yet in a release.
Data products: The source catalog format was updated a couple of times along the way to delivering the final form of the 1FGL catalog to the FSSC. Elizabeth F. is preparing an updated description of the contents of the main data products served at the FSSC (FT1, 'extended FT1', and FT2).
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- Likelihood v16r0p0: Bug fix for resampling of model maps in binned likelihood. The modification entails enabling interpolation of the model maps when resampling using the input counts map geometry.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that there's no news
Observation simulation
From Jim:
- celestialSources/genericSources v1r14p4: bug fix for half pixel offset in sampling input FITS maps SRCMOD-14@JIRA [for MapSource and MapCube sources]
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim:
- dataSubselector: addressing STGEN-95@JIRA: INDEF keywords used for gtselect to allow for default behavior for the time range and acceptance cone selections. This uses changes checked in to ape 2.6 and hoops v1r1p4. Waiting for James to close the related issue STGEN-96@JIRA before resolving.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r15p6. There's not much development news since the holiday break.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news development news. Zhaoyu and Johann have been documenting some likelihood analysis mysteries (biases in fits) possibly related to exposure calculation - more details in a future report.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that there's no news
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim:
This was a request from the FSSC to have our code include the file paths in the caldb.indx file in a conforming manner. irfs/caldb v2r0p0, irfs/latResponse v2r6p0, not yet in ST HEAD. For people using a given build of ST, in a correctly configured environment, this change should be completely transparent.
Source Catalog
1FGL catalog day and night.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools since last week has been v9r15p6. A summary of the changes since v9r15p5 is here. There's not much development news since last week. Only one new HEAD build has been made, with changes to the sourcelike package and a number of updates to pulsar tools packages (see below).
Jim notes that "Eric Winter has been proposing various minor modifications to the source code in the Likelihood, observationSim, dataSubselector, celestialSources, irfs and other packages in order to build on all of the platforms supported by the FSSC. All of the changes are minor and Eric has been contacting package owners with the proposed changes."
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that "the latest pulsar tools packages were promoted to release candidates (i.e., HEAD build). The major changes since the latest Science Tools (v9r15p6) are: to improve ephemeris-related output messages, to add new option psrdbfile=NONE, to give tolerance at the boundaries of FT2 coverage, and to fix the bug on long-to-double conversions on 64-bit machines."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news. Given the outcoome of the validation studies presented at the C&A meeting this week, the new Pass 7.2 IRFs in the current Science Tools release probably should be considered suspect, although the problem yet may be determined to be with the Pass 7.2 reprocessing.
Source Catalog
Converging on the year-1 catalog paper remains the most pressing current topic.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is v9r15p6. A summary of the changes since v9r15p5 is here. You will notice a number of mostly-small changes that have been accumulating in HEAD builds, along with plenty of work by Jim on the IRF-handling infrastructure, including the (eventual) detailed calculation of exposures taking into account rate-dependent inefficiencies. Some of the other changes with the new release are described below.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From the Release Manager build information it looks like Jim has been working on SummedLikelihood in pyLikelihood
Josh Lande reports that with this release sourcelike compiles for the first time for the Linux builds in the Release Manager.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that there's no new news. He has prepared a technical description of the handling of timing parameters, for developers.
Observation simulation
Max Razzano has added binary modulation as an option in the Pulsar source. Luis Reyes has implemented an updated version of eblAtten - I'm not sure what is new about it. Jim has modified SimpleTransient to allow photon index -1. This release has Jim's reimplementation of GaussianSource from Josh.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
See mention of IRF work at the top of the report
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and the converging on the year-1 catalog paper remain the current topics.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is still v9r15p5, although a new release continues to be anticipated. The only noteworthy item this week is Jim's implementation (reported below under Infrastructure) of the new PSF parametrization by Matthew and Riccardo. This is needed to handle the Pass 7.2 IRFs that will soon be available for testing.
Data products: No new news. The FSSC is proposing some small updates, transparent to users, to be able to handle deliveries of FT1 and LS1 data products with different analysis cuts (e.g., Pass 6 and Pass 7.2) if necessary.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- modifications to SummedLikelihood interface to allow for use with UpperLimits classes (pyLikelihood v1r18p1) [not yet in a release or Release Manager HEAD build]
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that there's no new news.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim:
- implemented new PSF formulation from Matthew and Riccardo
(irfs/latResponse v2r4p0, irfs/handoff_response v4r4p1) [not yet in a release or HEAD build]
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and the converging on the year-1 catalog paper is the focus.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is still v9r15p5, although a new release continues to be anticipated soon.
Eric W. reports that he has made a new build of the Mac version of the FSSC Science Tools distribution that fixes some bugs (apparently specific to the Mac distribution) that Richard pointed out to him. Eric W. says that the fixes will be incorporated in the next FSSC release. I don't know more specifically what the issues were.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. Zhaoyu Yang and Johann have been investigating via simulations some apparent biases in maximum likelihood fit results for diffuse sources. More details as things settle out, e.g., regarding any dependence on size of ROI or energy range.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that there's no new news.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and the development of the year-1 catalog continue to be the focus.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is still v9r15p5, although a new release is anticipated soon. This report describes some of the new features for the next release.
Eric W. reports that he has got v9r15p5 building at the FSSC. The current public release is based on v9r15p2. My understanding is that p5 is 'close' to the next release, so the time spent getting v9r15p5 to build with the HEASARC hmake system was also in preparation for the next public release.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- Likelihood:
- Added photon flux and errors for each source component to the
output of the gtlike application (Likelihood v15r8p0) - Provided user-friendly error messages when incorrect xml model
files are provided by the user (Likelihood v15r8p1)
[Again, these are not in the current release, although they are available as part of the current HEAD builds for SLAC Linux.]
- Added photon flux and errors for each source component to the
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news
Observation simulation
From Jim:
- observationSim:
- Provided user-friendly error messages when incorrect xml model
files are provided by the user (observationSim v8r4p2)
- Provided user-friendly error messages when incorrect xml model
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and the development of the year-1 catalog continue to be the focus.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is still v9r15p5, although a new release is anticipated in the foreseeable future. A subset of the next release will be the basis of the next public release of the Science Tools by the FSSC, probably sometime in December after a now-standard testing cycle at the FSSC. This was discussed in an FSSC-LAT team teleconference last week (D Davis, C Shrader, E Winter, J Chiang, S Digel).
The timing for the new public release is constrained by the Cycle 3 proposal deadline, which will be in February, and the desire to have the next release well before the due date. Some features have been requested by users of the public versions of the tools, like allowing the HEASARC 'INDEF' parameter as a response to prompts in Science Tools and having the tools able to tell if obssim and likelihood XML model definitions are being mixed up. (INDEF tells the tool to read the prompted parameter, like ROI center, from the header of the FT1 file.) The FSSC also would like to include the PyLikelihood upper limits functionality that is already in v9r15p5, and to make ModelEditor work on the Mac.
Eric W. reports that the Mac binary distribution at the FSSC (a large subset of v9r15p2) works without changes under the Snow Leopard version of Mac OS X.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing special in the pulsar tools development. I am currently working on minor improvements on the pulsar tools"
Observation simulation
Josh Lande has modified the definition of the GaussianSource source. In the new version (in HEAD builds but not yet in a release) the major and minor axis parameters will be assumed to be 1-sigma after the other axis is integrated over. Josh will update the documentation with Chuck accordingly. The change does not affect the functionality, just the meanings of the size parameters.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and the development of the year-1 catalog continue to be the focus.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r15p5. Here are the package differences from v9r15p4. Most of the changes relate to likelihood analysis and this is the first release that has the sourcelike package. Some specifics are given below.
Eric W. reports that at the FSSC they have been "oing some tweaking to our test procedures, and we've now incorporated the sane package in our builds so that we can compare our numerical results directly to those at SLAC."
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that the new UpperLimits functionality mentioned in last week's report is included in Science Tools v9r15p5. See Jim's documentation at Likelihood Usage Notes.
He also reports that the new implementation of the rate-dependent inefficiency corrections that he described in the C&A meeting yesterday, is in irfs/irfInterface v2r4p1 and the ST LATEST1.2789 build. This is not yet released. Philippe's test of the corrections for the spectral analysis of Vela look promising, removing much of the ~+/-3% flux variation (>100 MeV) over the precession period. The detailed rate-dependent inefficiency corrections can be thought of as the next order of correction beyond P6v3, which has a kind of all-sky average correction.
v9r15p5 includes the sourcelike package. I'd refer you to Josh Lande regarding use or testing of the sourcelike tools; I see that some documentation is available in Confluence.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing special in the pulsar tools development. Some minor improvements were made in error/warning messages. The changes were cvs-committed to the SLAC repository, but the new versions were not tagged for future release yet."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and the development of the year-1 catalog continue to be the focus.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r15p4. The development news below describes changes that will be in a future release (although are in the code repository now).
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that he has added Steve Fegan's code for calculating upper limits to v1r17 of the pyLikelihood package. He also fixed some bugs in UpperLimits.py, including the bayesianUL(...) method. See Jim's documentation at Likelihood Usage Notes.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "We fixed a bug in the pulsar tools infrastructure, which has been reported by the FSSC programmers in their effort of porting Science Tools into 64-bit machines. It is (supposed to be) fixed in the late version, although Release Manager reports some minor problems, which I think I can fix soon."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and the development of the year-1 catalog continue to be standard topics these days. Elizabeth pointed out some coming proposal deadlines relevant for follow-up observations.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r15p4.
The high-energy PSF issue that Toby has long championed and the recent realization by Matthew that the parametrization of the PSF is not particular accurate in general at least starting with P6v3 are motivations for a new parametrization and fit. A new parametrization will also require coding in the Science Tools. The schedule is not set.
Regarding the public distribution of the Science Tools, Chris reports that their help desk is getting 5-6 queries per day, of increasingly deeper nature. Eric W. says that installation/portability issues still come up but with various 'bleeding edge' Linux versions but they are generally able to deal with these quickly. He says that they are starting to plan the next public release.
Data products: No new news.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. The sourcelike package is now being built by the Release Manager in HEAD builds (on Linux). Getting it to go in Linux was the work of Josh, with help from Jim and I think also Toby. sourcelike is a likelihood analysis tool that has been developed in particular for fitting of source extent. I've not seen documentation yet. At some point Josh et al. do plan to make sourcelike part of the internal Science Tools releases.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he has been working on bug fixes and minor improvements.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and the development of the year-1 catalog are standard topics these days. Toby has recently presented pointlike-derived TS maps for essentially all sources.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r15p4.
Eric W. reports that "The FSSC now has 100% passage of its thread tests for the science tools on all 8 officially supported platforms, using a distribution based on Science Tools v9r15p2. So as far as the science tools are concerned, the FSSC is in great shape for the piblic release - we're at the stage of tweaking documentation and tests."
Data products: Studies in C&A on Pass 7.1 are continuing.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing special in the pulsar tools development. We are working on the tutorials as well as minor bug fixes."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list was the topic last week, along with a discussion of calculating flux uncertainties, and aspects of a new 1-year simulation for studying the performance of the catalog analysis.
Science Tools Working Group
[Updated on August 12, 2009]
The current release of the Science Tools is v9r15p4. It is not a major update relative to v9r15p3, obviously; the driver for the update was fixing a bug in the UpperLimits class in PyLikelihood.
The FSSC has wrapped up testing of the subset of v9r15p2 that they will support for public users of the LAT data. From Dave Davis: "One issue that is still hanging around is that the fix to the f2c headers is still different for the SLAC and FSSC version. Our problem is that the SLAC fix fails on 64 bit systems. We still need to try and merge the two fixes."
Data products: Studies in C&A on Pass 7.1 are continuing.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I've updated the CompositeLikelihood interface so that it correctly
displays the errors for each of the fit parameters. I also added a
function that users can use to have Minuit or NewMInuit compute minos
errors for any parameter. This differs from the function that does
this in the standard pyLikelihood classes since CompositeLikelihood
groups parameters from the common source components in a special way.
pyLikelihood v1r16p0
- Johann has updated the DMFitFunction spectral model to enable upper
limit calculations with CompositeLikelihood. Likelihood v15r4p0.
These updates are not in the current release of Science Tools.
GRB tools
The current release contains a fix for gtrspgen. According to the release notes for the rspgen package James has corrected a "bug that caused the last interval in the spacecraft file to be silently discarded."
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing in the pulsar tools development. We've been dealing with users' queries on pulsar- and timing-related issues."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list, potential improvements, and associations were topics last week.