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Welcome to Krioma.net. If you would like to view any of my previous articles then please see the blog page. This also has a handy search tool. Please note that this page is updated regularly and should automatically refresh but this is not always the case. Also, you can now [follow me on twitter].

Recent Blog Entries:

Integration in R Category: Computing r research
A reminder to myself of something I did quite a while go, how to do integration with [R]. dj integrand integrate(Vectorize(integrand), lower = 0, upper = 10) Of course the [R documentation] is of great use too....

M42: The Orion Nebula Category: Astronomy Photos messier
I love looking at the Orion nebula. Its always a lovely object to look at - its even better to take photos of it. I've not managed a properly deep image yet and the one that I'll show you below was affected by a pretty bright Moon. The Orion Nebula (Messier 42) is a diffuse nebula situated south of...

Moon and plane over Birmingham Category: Photos moon
Not that long ago I managed to capture a lovely full Moon with a plane in the same field:...

Convert 3gp to a better format Category: Computing ffmpeg video
By default my phone camera takes video in 3gp format - which isn't the best for sharing around... so here is how to convert it using ffmpeg on linux: Firstly you might need to install ffmpeg and some libraries: sudo apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-52 You can just do: ffmpeg -r 1 -i VIDEO...

AMI Small Array Movie Category: Astronomy
A time lapse movie of the Arcminute Microkelvin Image (AMI) small array, I made by grabbing the webcam feed: Watch on youtube....

Recover data with ddrescue Category: Computing linux
Been handed a dead hard drive and want to try and recover some of the data? That's the problem I had the other day. So I turned to some good old linux tools to try and recover the data. One of my favourite recovery tools is ddrescue. It works really well and given enough time can do a pretty solid ...

Music of 2011 Category: General Me Music
At the end of each year, yes I know I'm a few days early but bah I have to move house at the start of the new year, I like to summarise the music I've been listening to. The last few years have been much easier as last.fm keeps hold of that info. I suspect that its missing about 20% of the music I l...

A review of my 2011 Category: General Me Photos
2011 will always be one of the most memorable years in my life - it better be as I did get married :-) The year started off with me being back in the UK for my birthday which was great but my time at home was all to short and I jetted back off to Calgary (Canada). It is always a sad time to end up...

Observing last night - Jupiter + Dumbbell Category: wast hills
It wasn't particularly clear during our observing session, which was mostly aimed at taking a look at the ISS and Jupiter with our own eyes, but we focused the Meade out at Wast Hills and took a couple of images... If you change the contrast a little you can clearly see the Moons: It was rathe...

Creating FITS files in c++ Category: Astronomy Computing c++ casa
A simple example, very similar to that given in the CFITSIO guidebook, on how to create a FITS file using CFITSIO. In this case I'm also building against some casacore libraries, but these aren't going to be used in this little code snippet but the idea is to use casacore todo further analysis. I'm ...

CASA leap seconds issue Category: Astronomy Computing casa
I had an odd CASA issue yesterday. It was complaining about missing leap second information for TAI_UTC! Seemed really quite odd to me as I hadn't done anything to my installation... anyway simple fix is to update the latest leap second information into CASA by running a simple command in the root c...

Spectral Extraction in Python Category: Astronomy Computing fits python spectra wast hills
I've wrote about how to read in FITS files in Python before, but I thought I'd readdress as I've been writing lots about fitting and wanted to build up to fitting properly calibrated data. So in this example I will add how to extract a spectra too. For this example I'm going to use a calibration lam...

Christmas Tree Cluster Category: Astronomy wast hills
Probably not the best picture I'll ever take of this source, I blame the bright moon, but here is a picture of the Christmas Tree Cluster that we took last night.... ... so "ho ho ho, merry Christmas"....

Multiple Gaussian Fitting in Python Category: Astronomy Computing fitting python
Yesterday I showed you [how to fit a single Gaussian in some data]. Today lets deal with the case of two Gaussians. This came about due to some students trying to fit two Gaussian's to a shell star as the spectral line was altered from a simple Gaussian, actually there is a nice P-Cygni dip in there...

Gaussian Fitting in python Category: Astronomy Computing gaussian python spectral line
I spend a lot of my time working on noise statistics and of course and an important part of this is how to fit signals. I was asked earlier for an example code on how to fit a Gaussian, in particular fitting well defined signals. In python this is quite straight forward as you already have a bunch o...