Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is v9r15p3. Here are the differences from v9r15p2. It is not a major update, obviously, but looks like it has some useful improvements for likelihood analysis and for simulating sources with EBL attenuation.
The FSSC is wrapping up pre-release testing of the subset of v9r15p2 that will be publicly released next month. We may get some feedback on they have found.
Data products: Studies in C&A on Pass 7 are continuing.
Databases and related utilities
N.B. The bug that Vlasios reported with the FT2 files retrieved by the new AstroServer turned out to be in the 30-s versions of the Pass 7 reprocessed versions (i.e., the files with the new FT2 columns). The Pass 6 FT2 files that the AstroServer retrieves are fine.
A total of a 3 intervals in the FT2 file for the 11-month catalog analysis have livetime fraction<=0 but still contain events. For most applications, these problems out of >760k intervals are quite ignorable. For some, like an analysis that Jim made, these odd intervals are show-stoppers. He suggested that filtering (gtmktime) on LIVETIME/(STOP-START)>0.65 will remove these and a few other intervals with suspiciously low livetime fractions. The ISOC has the information about the bad intervals.
Likelihood analysis
No direct news. The release notes indicate a bug-fix was applied to the UpperLimits class in pyLikelihood.
STOP PRESS (21 Jul 2009, 18:26 UTC): Unfortunately, there is still a bug in this class, a new one introduced when I tried to fix the previous one. I'll fix that tonight and will tag a new pyLikelihood and make a new ST release. -Jim
gttsmap now generates maps with CDELT1<0., so they are oriented correctly on the sky (RA or longitude increasing to the left).
GRB tools
No direct news. rspgen was updated to handle azimuthal dependence in the effective area tables
Pulsar tools
No news
Observation simulation
LR implemented some new EBL models, including Gilmore, Franceschini et al., and Razzaque et al.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
The 11-month source list and potential improvements were topics last week along with the year-1 Catalog paper.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r15p2.
Data products: No news on Pass 7; studies in C&A are continuing.
Databases and related utilities
N.B. Vlasios has reported a bug with the FT2 files retrieved by the new AstroServer.
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- Fixed a bug in gttsmap so that it can read a list of input FT1 files that have the "@"-sign prepended (as per FTOOLS conventions). Likelihood v15r2p1.
- Added an interface to pyLikelihood to give users easier access to the Minos error calculation available from the Minuit and NewMinuit optimizers. Documentation here. optimizers v2r17p1, pyLikelihood v1r15.
[These updates are available in the packages indicated and will be in the next ScienceTools releases; they are not in the current release.]
See note below about optimizers and 64-bit systems.
GRB tools
No news.
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that there's no development news; he has been working on testing for the public ScienceTools release in August.
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Eric W.: With help from Jim Chiang and Pat Nolan, we localized another problem with the optimizer code that arose in 64-bit systems in v9r15p2. I've got a FSSC patch in place, and I'll be in contact with Jim and Pat about it.
Source Catalog
Last week the primary topic was planning for the Year 1 catalog and associated paper.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r15p2. There's not a lot of news this week. v9r15p2 is the 'freeze' version for public release (i.e., for the packages that will be part of the public distribution to be released in August). The FSSC is interested to establish how the public release (and future versions of the public release) versions will be managed while development continues in the LAT team Science Tools.
Data products: No news on Pass 7. It was announced yesterday that the AstroServer can now serve the reprocessed Pass 7 data (as well as the Pass 6 that it has been serving). The Pass 7 files that it has are from the original reprocessing, which have been seen to have greater rates of residual backgrounds than Pass 6.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
- EBL attenuation can now be applied to a number of spectral models. This uses the same code available to gtobssim in the celestialSources/eblAtten package. A description of its use is available here (celestialSources/eblAtten v0r7p1, optimizers v2r17, Likelihood v15r2)
- Eric Winter reported a failure of one of the Likelihood package unit tests on 64-bit SL5. Diagnostic output indicates that some values are not being calculated the same way as in the corresponding unit test on slac linux. I've asked Eric to build the sane package under the FSSC system for this platform so that I can compare the output of the end-to-end tests of the tools.
GRB tools
No news. To judge from the Release Manager, James has been working on updates to gtrspgen to handle IRFs that have azimuthal variations of effective area. This is not is a release version, and may not make it to a release.
Pulsar tools
From Masa: The tutorials at FSSC were updated for the latest versions. A minor improvement was made in the unit test of periodSearch package (for robustness against rounding errors), and the new version was tagged as v10r7p1 (not yet promoted for a release candidate).
Observation simulation
No news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Last week the primary topic was again the P6v3 9-month source list. Eric N. and Johann gave presentations on the Galactic center region and Toby gave updates on source detection (sources not in the NMS list) and on elliptical localization regions.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r15p2. Here are the package differences from v9r15p1. Relative to v9r15p1 most of the important differences are in likelihood analysis, although Jim has also implemented a speed-up for observation simulation (see below).
Eric W. reports that he is starting work on a port of v9r15p2 to the FSSC build environment. Yesterday was the freeze date for the version of the Science Tools that the FSSC will distribute at the time of the public data release. Remember that only a (large) subset of the Science Tools packages are part of the public release; these are listed in the ST_dist package.
Data products: As you probably have heard the Pass 7 classifications will need to be reworked, and the reprocessing for Pass 7 (Merit and FT1) performed again. The timescale for doing this is at least weeks. The reprocessed Pass 7 data are still available as is in the Data Catalog.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim: [these are in Science Tools v9r15p2]
- fixed Jean's 1/2 pixel offset problem [see, e.g., slide 7 of Jean's report to the Diffuse group] with convolved maps using MapCube models (Likelihood v15r1p4)
- completed the SummedLikelihood interface to include TS calculations (pyLikelihood v1r14p1)
Also, these new features mentioned last week are now in the current release:
- Fixed a bug in the event class handling in gtdiffrsp [revealed I think by processing Pass 7 files that had an event class selection made with gtselect]. Likelihood v15r0p3
- Added a new function for spectral fitting: SmoothBrokenPowerLaw implemented by Benoit Lott. Likelihood v15r1p1 [fixed in v15r1p2, which is part of the current release]
- Added SummedLikelihood to Likelihood v15r0p3, pyLikelihood v1r14. This interface will allow users to combine likelihood calculations that have identical xml model definitions. Unbinned and binned analysis can be combined as well as separate front vs back for binned analysis.
As a reminder, gtfindsrc was updated in Science Tools v9r13 to return the radius of the 68% confidence region. Formerly it had returned the sigma of a 2-dimensional gaussian fit to the profile of the likelihood surface at the position of the source. The documentation is not yet clear on this point.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: In v9r15p2, the tools now recognize FERMI in addition to GLAST for timeformat and userformat parameters. And I plan to update the tutorials for the change sometime soon.
Observation simulation
From Jim: improved the algorithm to look up the livetime from flight FT2 files. Speed-ups of a factor of a few should be seen. (observationSim v8r4)
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Last week the primary topic was again the P6v3 9-month source list, including presentations on improvements in source detection (Ludovic and Toby) and a report by Toby on elliptical fits to the source localization regions.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r15p1. Here are the package differences from v9r14. The major difference from v9r14 is in having a test version of likelihood analysis taking into account rate-dependent inefficiencies. This is being shaken down now. See below for news about SummedLikelihood and a new spectral function for likelihood fitting.
Eric W. reports that he is starting work on a port of v9r15p1 to the FSSC build environment, and that it should be done in a few days. The freeze and test phase for the release to accompany the year 1 data will start June 15.
Data products: The full Pass 7 reprocessing is complete, or nearly so, at the Merit level and FT1 level. However, the background rejection is clearly not as good as expected, and the reasons for this are still being investigated. The reprocessed Pass 7 data are available in the Data Catalog only. Some validation tests are ongoing, basically to try to catch any other problems, but another Pass 7 reprocessing most likely will be required.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- David P.'s parameterization of the rate and energy dependent efficiency corrections were implemented and tagged in irfs/irfInterface v2r3p1, Likelihood v15, pyExposure v2r4
- Fixed a bug in the event class handling in gtdiffrsp [revealed I think by processing Pass 7 files that had an event class selection made with gtselect]. Likelihood v15r0p3
- Added a new function for spectral fitting: SmoothBrokenPowerLaw implemented by Benoit Lott. Likelihood v15r1p1
- Added SummedLikelihood to Likelihood v15r0p3, pyLikelihood v1r14. This interface will allow users to combine likelihood calculations that have identical xml model definitions. Unbinned and binned analysis can be combined as well as separate front vs back for binned analysis.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
From Jim:
- Enable users to set set the filename of the temporary root file used by makeFT1. This takes advantage of new capability [implemented by James P.] in tip (v2r15) for setting this filename. fitsGen v4r5
Source Catalog
Last week the primary topic was again the P6v3 9-month source list, and Juergen's first (and now 2nd) pass at source associations.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r14. Here are the package differences from v9r13. The major difference from v9r13 is inclusion of the preliminary Pass 7 IRFs (P7_V1_S3, P7_V1_TRANSIENT, P7_V1_SOURCE, P7_V1_DIFFUSE).
Eric W. reports that he is starting work on a port of v9r14 to the FSSC build environment, and that it should be done in a few days. The freeze and test phase for the release to accompany the year 1 data will start ~June 15.
Data products: The full Pass 7 reprocessing is complete, or nearly so, at the Merit level. FT1 generation is starting from the reprocessed Merit files.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim implemented a fix for the case where a phi-dependent IRF (like P6_V5) is specified but a livetime cube that does not have the variations with phi tabulated. The fix has likelihood ignore the phi dependence of the effective area, so the user at least gets a result that is not wrong.
Jim also reports that he is working on handling the trigger rate-dependent inefficiency in exposure calculations and likelihood analysis.
Jean has reported a possible bug in how gtscrmaps handles diffuse sources, or possibly in how diffuse sources are convolved with the PSF. Jim will be looking into it.
GRB tools
No direct news. James Peachey has resolved and/or closed a number of GRB-related JIRA issues: GRB-5, GRB-13, GRB-15, and GRB-18. These are not in the v9r14 releease.
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "The improvements of the unit tests are done, and the pulsar tools packages were tagged for new versions. Now, I am introducing the new mission name (FERMI) in their interface like TELESCOP keyword values, timeformat/userformat parameter values, and error messages."
The mismatch between what kinds of timing solutions the D4 format and the pulsar tools can support vs. the kinds of timing solutions that are coming from the pulsar timing consortium has been clear to LAT pulsar people, including Masa, for some time. For example, the D4 format and tools can handle up to 2nd order timing solutions, but the as-received ephemerides sometimes ahve much higher order. The LAT pulsar people have workarounds using the TEMPO2 radio timing tool. Discussions about what to do regarding delivery to the FSSC and FSSC support for pulsar tools are ongoing.
Observation simulation
Toby is working on the OBS-14 JIRA issue on assignment of the DATE-OBS keyword for simulations.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
James also closed a number of ST-GEN JIRA issues: STGEN-58, STGEN-13, STGEN-18, STGEN-19, STGEN-24, STGEN-28, STGEN-58, and STGEN-59
Source Catalog
Last week the primary topic was the P6v3 9-month source list.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r13. Here are the package differences from v9r12. Jim reports that the driver for the release was some changes to support Pass 7 reprocessing (see below) but does not include Pass 7 IRFs (all of which are preliminary at this point). The release includes the speed-up for Likelihood analysis and the new options for simulating isotropic sources that were mentioned in last week's report.
Eric W. reports that he is starting work on a port of v9r13 to the FSSC build environment. For the packages/tools that are part of the FSSC builds this will mean that a larger variety of binary distributions will be available.
Late breaking: Jean has reported that hidden parameters have a surprising feature in the Science Tools. He points out that the switch to toltype=ABS in gtlike (the default since v9r12 for this hidden parameter) will not take place if the user already has a local copy of gtlike.par with the earlier default (toltype=REL). James Peachey reminds that the FTOOL pset can be used to permanently change the value of a hidden parameter.
Data products: The full Pass 7 reprocessing is "charging ahead" at the Merit level, and the results are being checked. As of this writing (Monday evening), 1,384,014,512 events have been processed, according to the Data Catalog.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he is continuing to work on improving the unit tests for the pulsar tools
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Important update for Pass 7 From Jim:
From the user perspective, the main change is the content of the EVENT_CLASS variable in FT1, which is now filled with FT1EventClass from merit. Operationally, this means that one can now filter on event class using gtselect, e.g.,
gtselect evclsmin=3
instead of needing to resort to using fcopy (or the like) to filter on CTBCLASSLEVEL (now no longer filled in FT1). There is a related change in gtdiffrsp. Previously, one could restrict the diffuse response calculation to diffuse class photons (even if the FT1 file contained transient and source class events) by doing
gtdiffrsp ctbmin=3
Now one would do
gtdiffrsp evclsmin=3
Source Catalog
Last week the topics included unidentified sources, the pulsar catalog, the influence of the diffuse emission model on the 6-month source list, and plans for the 9-month source list, which Jean is decoupling from Pass 7.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is still v9r12.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is being tested, at the Merit file level.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I re-implemented the BandFunction available for Likelihood analyses in order to allow users to specify the energy scale for evaluating the power-law parts of that function (J. Ballet request). The workbook documentation has been updated (Likelihood v14r8)
- I modified gtfindsrc, gttsmap, the TS calculation in gtlike and pyLikelihood, and the upper limits calculation in pyLikelihood to use the new function in the optimizers package, Optimizer::find_min_only (in optimizers v2r15p9), which skips the covariance matrix calculation at the best-fit location. This should speed up the execution of these tools [possibly by a factor of a few]. (Likelihood v14r9, pyLikelihood v1r12p2)
- The error radius returned by gtfindsrc now includes the 1.51 factor derived by Juergen. This means that the reported value can be directly interpreted as 68% containment radius.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he is continuing to work on improving the unit tests for the pulsar tools
Observation simulation
From Jim: "I modified the Isotropic source used in gtobssim to model the extragalactic diffuse component. Users can now specify a cone on the sky over which the incident photons will be generated. Here is an example xml definition:
<source name="Extragalactic_diffuse_20">
<spectrum escale="MeV">
<SpectrumClass name="Isotropic" params="flux=10.7,gamma=2.1,emin=20.,emax=2e5,ra=0,dec=0,radius=20"/>
<use_spectrum frame="galaxy"/>
</spectrum>
</source>
(celestialSources/genericSources v1r13)
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No new news
Source Catalog
No meeting last week
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools is now v9r12. Here are the package differences from v9r11. As Jim summarizes it, the new release includes updates to the pulsar tools, and the new P6_V4 & P6_V5 IRFs, and the corrected energy dispersions for P6_V[3-5]. See Riccardo's Summary of response function sets.
Note that the P6_V4 and P6_V5 IRFs have the azimuthal variation of the effective area; Jim reminds me that gtltcube can now tabulate the azimuthal dependence of the livetime accumulation with the command-line parameter phibins, which defaults to 0. I'm not aware of studies yet of the effect of accounting for azimuthal variations on the likelihood analysis of sources.
Eric W. reports that the FSSC is about to start porting v9r12 to the build system at the FSSC.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is still getting into gear, now anticipated for later this week. The actual reprocessing should take only a day or so.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports that the main update to Likelihood in v9r12 is the switch to absolute tolerances as the default way to specify convergence tolerances.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing spectacular in the pulsar tools development. Some bugs and issues were resolved, then the pulsar tools packages were tagged. The new versions are all tested all right, according the Release Manager at SLAC, as a part of Science Tools v9r12. Also, I started working on improving their unit tests because some test conditions are too loose."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No new news
Source Catalog
Last week Andrea discussed the plans for the first LAT pulsar catalog and Jean described the development of the 9-month source list.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r11. Eric Winter reports that the FSSC is working toward an internal freeze date in June for their next public release of the Science Tools, planned to coincide with the public release of the LAT data in August.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is still getting into gear, now anticipated for early next week. The actual reprocessing should take only a day or so.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Juergen has documented differences in spectral analysis results between unbinned and binned likelihood analysis for extended sources. Jim is suspecting that the issue is with gtdiffrsp for extended (but not all-sky) sources. The binned likelihood results, which do not rely on the diffuse responses, appear to be reliable.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that there's no news this week.
Observation simulation
No new news.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
(Updated carry over from last week) In Science Tools v9r11 gtexpcube has a default parameter file that has hardwired inputs and does not prompt the user for inputs. This is in JIRA. As a workaround, Jim points out that you can run 'gtexpcube mode=q', which forces the tool to prompt for input.
Source Catalog
Last week Steve Fegan presented a comparison of methods for evaluating upper limits, Robin presented an investigation of power spectra of 6-month catalog sources and Toby presented a comprehensive, uniform set of source location, confidence region, and spectrum plots for these sources. Gulli described steps toward refining the Galactic diffuse emission model. The updates to the BSL paper was also discussed.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r11.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is still getting into gear; yesterday Richard forecast one more week for all of the aspects to be finalized.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
From Jim:
- I implemented the "efficiency factor" that accounts for the trigger rate and energy dependent effects of ghost events on the effective area. The implementation is based on the parameterization of the trigger rate as a function of livetime fraction and of the linear fits to the relative efficiency as a function of trigger rate for different energy bands as described on slides 1 and 29 of David Paneque's presentation to C&A on April 20.
The code reads in a text file that contains the required six parameters. Currently, the location of that file is specified by an environment variable, EFFICIENCY_PAR_FILE, but eventually, this information would probably be added as an extension in the effective area FITS files in CALDB.
- I tested and updated the new P6_V[345] IRFs that Riccardo provided after having fixed the energy dispersion bug he reported at C&A last Thursday. It is in irfs/caldb v0r9p1.
Using the efficiency factor information will require another extension to the tabulation of accumulated livetimes in gtltcube, to include tabulation of livetime-weighted deadtime fractions. David and Eric's studies indicate that residual backgrounds (which to first order increase with deadtime fraction and so counter the efficiency factors) may also be an important consideration in applying efficiency factors to analyses of diffuse emission.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Finally the example files in the pulsar tools tutorials were replaced (both at FSSC and at SLAC). I've been working on minor bugs and issues in the pulsar tools, hoping to fix them before the upcoming data release."
Observation simulation
(Carry over from last week) The bug that Masa reported a bug in how the DATE-OBS keyword is still open. Most likely you will not notice unless you are trying to run the pulsar tools on simulated data.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
(Carry over from last week) In Science Tools v9r11 gtexpcube has a default parameter file that has hardwired inputs and does not prompt the user for inputs. This is in JIRA. As a workaround you could replace your system copy of gtexpcube.par with the same file from an earlier release; entering all of the parameters on the command line won't help.
Source Catalog
Last week the primary topic was revisions to the Bright Source List paper in response to the referee's report.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r11. The forecast is still for a new release in the near future. As mentioned last week, among other things it will have P6_V4 and P6_V5 response functions that have been implemented by Riccardo.
LATE-BREAKING NEWS: Riccardo has found a small bug in how the energy dispersions are handled in the Pass 6 IRFs.
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is still getting into gear. The FT2 reprocessing task (to add some new columns has been defined for the pipeline.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim is investigating potential modifications to the calculation of diffuse responses to take into account the energy dispersion; Jean has demonstrated (in his studies for the Spectral Analysis Group) that at low energies this may be worthwhile for accuracy.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
Masa reports that he is updating the user documentation for the pulsar tools; working on example files.
Observation simulation
The bug that Masa reported a bug in how the DATE-OBS keyword is still open. Most likely you will not notice unless you are trying to run the pulsar tools on simulated data.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
In Science Tools v9r11 gtexpcube has a default parameter file that has hardwired inputs and does not prompt the user for inputs. This is in JIRA. As a workaround you could replace your system copy of gtexpcube.par with the same file from an earlier release; entering all of the parameters on the command line won't help.
Source Catalog
Last week Jean presented an investigation of the effect of the energy spacing of exposure maps on the results from likelihood analysis. Updates to the Bright Source List paper to respond to the referee's comments were also discussed.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r11. A new release may be coming this week. Among other things it will have P6_V4 and P6_V5 response functions that have been implemented by Riccardo. Jim reports that he has added them to irs/caldb v0r9. These new IRFs include azimuthal variation of the effective area and have the new (i.e., correct) implementation of the LPM effect. v4 was generated from an allGamma run without overlaid ghost events and v5
Data products: Reprocessing for Pass 7 is starting, sort of. Warren is working on the FT2 regeneration, which adds a few columns. The plan for event class designations is still converging, but doesn't have much time left to do it in.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
Jim reports: "There is a bug in the NewMinuit optimizer class that arises from an interface change to the Minuit2 library in ROOT v5.20 (this was discussed at last week's Software meeting). Pat is working on a fix." I'm afraid that I don't know any more details yet.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
No news (I asked late).
Observation simulation
Masa reported a bug in how the DATE-OBS keyword is set and another bug (now fixed) in how the TIMREF value is set in simulations. Most likely you will not notice unless you are trying to run the pulsar tools on simulated data.
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Last some of the discussion was about refinements - needed and in progress - for the diffuse emission model. Jean also had a brief update about his investigation of th effect of adjusting convergence tolerance settings in likelihood (including gtfindsrc) analyses.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r11.
Data products: Reprocessing is still in planning. The test LS1 file passed scrutiny at the FSSC. The plan for event class designations that Nicola presented yesterday at the C&A meeting includes having a new variable Ft1EventClass in the Merit files; this would map directly into EVENT_CLASS at the FT1 level, possibly removing the need for (or greatly simplifying) the event classifier script that makeFT1 currrently uses to generate classifications.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
No news. The LATEST builds indicate that Jim has been working on handling phi-dependent IRFs in likelihood analysis. This work in progress is not in HEAD or release versions.
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "Nothing special in the pulsar tools development. Right now I am
trying to replace example data files in the pulsar tools tutorials."
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
No news
Source Catalog
Last week most of the discussion again was related to the effects of changing convergence tolerance specifications in likelihood analysis; Toby gave an update on evaluating error ellipses (vs. error circles) using pointfit; he presented a new estimate for the effective width of the high-energy PSF.
Science Tools Working Group
The current release of the Science Tools remains v9r11.
Data products: Reprocessing is still in planning. Julie has prepared a dictionary file for the new, trimmer LS1 definition, described by Steve at a C&A meeting last month. This has been turned into a test file sent to the FSSC for scrutiny.
Databases and related utilities
No news
Likelihood analysis
- The next ST release will have the convergence tolerance specified as an absolute rather than a relative quantity by default. This is less likely to result in surprises (inadequate convergence) with larger data sets. (Likelihood v14r6, pyLikelihood v1r12)
- A bug-fix for using exponentially cut-off power-law models with binned likelihood was implememented. (Likelihood v14r6p1)
GRB tools
No news
Pulsar tools
From Masa: "We just published a new document describing what the pulsar tools do in detail. We will move it to somewhere more official on the FSSC web site, but we need to figure out where is best for it." This is a complete definition of what each tool does and how the various modules relate.
We learned last week that the FSSC has decided that Masa's updated pulsar tools documentation will first appear with the FSSC's documentation of the Science Tools and then be made available to Chuck for reformatting for the User Workbook. Presumably this procedure will apply for other updates to the documentation that originate the FSSC. We do need to figure out how to make documentation updates flow the other way, and to keep each other mutually informed about updates.
Lucas at Bordeaux is working on some examples of pulsar analysis that will include cases for which TEMPO2 ("The world's most poweerful pulsar timing package") is needed.
Observation simulation
No news
User interface and infrastructure (& utilities)
Eric W. reports that he has successfully imported Science Tools v9r11 into the HEASARC build system and is starting to systmatically port it to a number of versions of Linux. What the FSSC currently has available is based on v9r8p2.
Source Catalog
Last week most of the discussion again was related to the 6-month source list that Jean has developed; Toby described evaluating error ellipses (vs. error circles) using pointfit.