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Here are some steps to install casacore on Ubuntu (specifically 10.04 LTS ran as a virtual machine with VirtualBox on Ubuntu 11.10). This posting uses provided packages where possible and avoids, if necessary the installation of packages from source. This is mostly meant as a reference for myself and hence includes a few things that I had to specifically do and probably won't work for anyone else, I hope it does, but we all know what computers are like! Of course, you should go and see the latest on the [google code casacore] page. This is using casacore version 1.3.0.

wget casacore (see link above) and unpack.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

sudo apt-get install scons fort77 subversion g++ cmake libblas-dev liblapack-dev libqdbm-dev libfftw3-dev libcfitsio3-dev libboost-python-dev slang-cfitsio flex bison gfortran libhdf5-serial-dev libreadline5-dev python-scipy python-matplotlib python-pyfits

Download wcslib - and run make, make install

wget ftp://ftp.atnf.csiro.au/pub/software/wcslib/wcslib.tar.bz2
tar -xf wcslib.tar.bz2
cd wcslib-4.8.2
./configure --prefix=/usr/local/include/wcslib/
make && make install && cd ..

When compiling casacore I had a specific problem where a header file couldn't be found from wcslib, so quick fix;

sudo cp -r wcsconfig.h /usr/local/include/wcslib #from the wcslib dir

and that seemed to fix it.

Now install casacore with scons:

scons --prefix=/usr/local --enable-shared
sudo scons install

There are many different options available for the compilation - all the above does is make the shared libraries too... you should look into this but remember that the options.cache file needs to be removed if you do another make.

Couple of useful links when considering spectroscopic flux calibration out at [Wast Hills]:

[ESO's RA Ordered List of Spectrophotometric Standards]

and

[Selected UBVRI Photometric Standard Stars from Landolt 1992, AJ, 104, 340]

At the FAS Convention 2011 I went around a bunch of the telescopes of the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. There is quite an impressive [bunch of them].

[The Three Mirror Telescope] (3MT) is quite impressive, mostly cause it just doesn't look like it will work:

I also got to see, built in 1864 the 8 inch Thorrowgood Telescope:

which was nicely looking at some sunspots:

The most impressive in terms of size that I saw was the [Northumberland]:

In short, if you get chance a visit around the telescopes of the IoA is very much worth it.

A few more pictures taken at the FAS Convention can be seen [on flickr].

On Thursday night it was once again the University of Birmingham's Vale Firework show. This is an annual free event that takes place around the University halls with food, rides and a great show. I've been going along for about a decade, though I did miss the last two years due to being in Canada but well I'm back now so I had to go along and celebrate Guy Fawkes night (just a couple of days early!). Anyway I took a couple of pictures and a short video of the evening.. so here are the best bits:

Fire staff... the warm-up action from Circus soc

Some fireworks:

Oh and here is a short video (hosting on youtube):

and many more photos can be found in my [flickr set]

I've written about my trip out to the MRAO [before], but wanted to keep the theme up about quick posts about observatories...

The [Mullard Radio Astronomy Observatory] (MRAO) is one of the UK's most impressive radio astronomy sites. It hosts a collection of fantastic telescopes that have been part of the developing radio astronomy since the birth of the subject. Of course, its probably best known as the site of the discovery of pulsars (that resulted in a noble prize). There are still some world leading telescopes there and AMI is doing some fantastic science.

If you get to go there you are likely to see the One-Mile telescope (an interferometer of antennas about a mile long):

Arcminute Microkelvin Imager (AMI), a 20 GHz interferometer with both small and large arrays:

part of 4C (a cylindrical telescope):

and an element of the MERLIN array:

I'm currently in Paris - at [ADASS XXI] - a computational astronomy conference. I have a poster at the conference on Probing magnetic fields with GALFACTS. If you are interested the poster, which shows the first big rotation measure cube from GALFACTS in take a look at the pdf

Oh and on the social note, I got to go to the l'Observatoire de Paris:

NGC1501 - a planetary nebula taken with the Faulkes Telescope:

I was going through a few old notes and thought I'd post this. It's something that was always useful during the undergraduate labs at the University of Birmingham. In IRAF go: onedspec > wspectext. You should change the parameters using wspectext, we always found that using header=no and wformat=%0.2f the most useful.

For more information on IRAF including a manual that I wrote a while back see [the UoB obsering laboratory pages].

The 21st [ADASS] is over and I have had an interesting week full of astronomical software. The most impressive, I could be biased, web based software was the FITS viewer of [cyberska.org] in its raw "wow" effect. Though I did enjoy seeing many of the GPU talks and the speed ups that are possible, if you know what you are doing, on these massively parallel systems - might have to try and do a bit more [CUDA] as a result of this. Anyway, I've been maintaining a blog over at cyberska.org where I have been keeping rough notes with links to what has been going on.. so if you are interested in reading more take a look at:

ADASS Day 0

ADASS Day 1

ADASS Day 2

ADASS Day 3

ADASS Day 4

Oh and a brief discussion (and a link to) my poster can be found in [my previous blog entry on this].

The other day I was asked a question from a friend who was trying to run a pipeline on a bunch of data but wanted to check if a file existed before processing it. In python this is rather straightforward, you could either use the os module and test if a file exists (though this might have problems with speed of accessing files):

import os print os.path.exists("test.txt")

and then test if this is true or false, but you probably want to avoid race conditions. It is also much better programming standard to use a try statement, so something like:

filename = "test.txt" try: open(filename) except IOError as e: print 'Does not exist'

nice and then execute your code inside the try statement - or something along those lines with your code.

NGC2261 - Hubble’s variable Nebula taken with the Faulkes Telescope:

I occasionally use the Bradford Robotic Telescope for remote imaging... here is an image of the Ring Nebula, M57:

I went to Paris for ADASS XXI - a computational astronomy conference - it was an interesting conference full of the wonders of GPUs (I wrote about the [conference] and my [poster] previously). anyway, I also did some site seeing as my lovely other half flew out (Birmingham to Paris is a rather short flight) and we did a weekend of site seeing... here are a few highlights:

Of course you can't go to Paris and not go on and on about the Eiffel Tower... so I will. We went up it on definitely the worst day whilst we were there. It was very reduced visibility but oddly eerily cool:

from the top you just couldn't see a thing:

though later that night, it was just spectacular:

A surprise highlight of my trip was going into the Galeries Lafayette, something that Elizabeth wanted to see... pretty expensive shop but one heck of a focus:

She also surprised me by suggesting we go to Sainte-Chapelle - I had heard of this but was blown away by the place. I supposedly looked very disappointed by the first, lower room:

but the upper room is just "wow":

We did the other tourist things, going to Notre-Dame, Sacre Coeur, the Louvre and a bunch of palaces and squares but I won't bore you with a discussion of each (but if you want to see some pictures go take a look [at my flickr set]). The other things that really stood out to me where the awesome size of La Défense:

and seemingly never ending Musée d'Orsay:

Overall we had a great time and well we got a lot in in such a short stay, probably helped by the epic metro... never had to wait more than 5 minutes for a train! On that note I'll leave you with a picture of sunset over Place de la Concorde:

(oh and if you want to see more did I mention [my flickr set]? :-) )

Whilst we were in [Croatia] we took a short trip over the border into Slovenia to go and visit the glacial Lake Bled. So this is part 4 of our visits while in Croatia. The lake is surrounded by mountains and forests and is very picturesque. The lake surrounds Bled Island which is the the only natural island in Slovenia - its actually a short journey across water to the island.. well short when someone else is doing the work.

As you can see in the above image there is a Church on the island. This is the Pilgrimage Church of the Assumption of Mary which has a 52-metre tower with a nice clock face:

Whilst at Lake Bled we also went and visited iconic Bled Castle and St Martin church, which are around the lake:

St Martin has some lovely stained glass windows:

The Castle, which dates back to the 10th century is on the top of a cliff and offers a stunning view over the lake:

We really quite enjoyed our visit to Slovenia, be it brief, but we would love to go back and explore more of the country.

For more pictures of our trip see [the flickr set]

This is a short list of interesting and useful pages for anyone interested in amateur radio astronomy... not the best set of links but some stuff I found sat in my home directory with the tag "post this when you get a moment".

Have you ever heard the Sun? An introduction to radio astronomy of the Sun. Also the Metsähovi Radio Observatory does regular solar monitoring - they have some really nice images. More on the different types of burst can be found on The Radio Sun.

How to build and test a receiver and observe Jupiter - Radio JOVE. The Radio JOVE project is a really nice way of getting into radio astronomy. They also have a really nice discussion of the Jovian Decametric radio emission.

There is also the UK Amateur Radio Astronomy network and BAA radio group. Oh and don't forget the Society of Amateur Radio Astronomers.

The NRAO have an excellent page on some methods for putting together kit todo radio astronomy. The also have a page that is dedicated to the Procedure for Making the Itty Bitty Radio Telescope.

My conference proceedings for ADASS XXI have been published on arxiv. These are a short summary of the rotation measure synthesis we have been doing as part of the GALFACTS project:

"GALFACTS is a large-area spectro-polarimetric survey on the Arecibo Radio telescope. It uses the seven-beam focal plane feed array receiver system (ALFA) to carry out an imaging survey project of the 12,700 square degrees of sky visible from Arecibo at 1.4 GHz with 8192 spectral channels over a bandwidth of 300 MHz sampled at 1 millisecond. The aggregate data rate is 875 MB/s. GALFACTS observations will create full-Stokes image cubes at an angular resolution of 3.5' with a band-averaged sensitivity of 90uJy, allowing sensitive imaging of polarized radiation and Faraday Rotation Measure from both diffuse emission and extragalactic sources. GALFACTS is a scientific pathfinder to the SKA in the area of cosmic magnetism. Key to magnetism science with the SKA is the technique of RM synthesis. The technique of RM synthesis is introduced and we discuss practical aspects of RM synthesis including efficient computational techniques and detection thresholds in the resulting Faraday spectrum. We illustrate the use of the technique by presenting the current development of the RM synthesis pipeline for GALFACTS and present early results."

There was room for our first RM map (a moment map collapsing all the channels) in the paper:

I occasionally use the Bradford Robotic Telescope for remote imaging... here is an image of Jupiter's cloud belts with an OIII filter:

and scaling this logarithmically gives the Galilean moons too:

We had a great night observing out at Wast Hills last night. It was really good fun, even if the cloud did come out and beat us in the end. I'll post a few of the photographs with more discussion later but for now I wanted to share two of my favourite images from last night. One was us capturing Jupiter with a 0.0001s exposure in the U band and imaging the cloud belts - that's a first for myself:

I also took my camera along last night, though alas I had my tripod but forgot the crucial bit that links my camera to it - oh well I still managed to get a few decent shots without the camera shake, such as:

The observatory with Orion rising in the background. As I say I'll post more later but if you are interested the full set of photos from last night can be found over on flickr.

A bit faint but you can just make out M76 - The Little Dumbell with the Bradford Robotic Telescope:

Whilst making an update to the FAS Membership and Renewal System (MARS) I decided to add a drop down box for the list of counties, so that we can force people to pick one that is up-to-date... anyway, I created a php array of these and thought it might be handy for someone so they could just copy and paste it:

$listcounties = array("Avon","Bedfordshire","Berkshire","Buckinghamshire", "Cambridgeshire","Cheshire", "Cleveland", "Cornwall", "Cumbria", "Derbyshire", "Devon", "Dorset", "Durham", "East Sussex", "Essex", "Gloucestershire", "Hampshire", "Herefordshire", "Hertfordshire", "Isle of Wight", "Kent", "Lancashire", "Leicestershire", "Lincolnshire", "London", "Merseyside", "Middlesex", "Norfolk", "Northamptonshire", "Northumberland", "North Humberside", "North Yorkshire", "Nottinghamshire", "Oxfordshire", "Rutland", "Shropshire", "Somerset", "South Humberside", "South Yorkshire", "Staffordshire", "Suffolk", "Surrey", "Tyne and Wear", "Warwickshire", "West Midlands", "West Sussex", "West Yorkshire", "Wiltshire", "Worcestershire", "Clwyd", "Dyfed", "Gwent", "Gwynedd", "Mid Glamorgan", "Powys", "South Glamorgan", "West Glamorgan", "Aberdeenshire", "Angus", "Argyll", "Ayrshire", "Banffshire", "Berwickshire", "Bute", "Caithness", "Clackmannanshire", "Dumfriesshire", "Dunbartonshire", "East Lothian", "Fife", "Inverness-shire", "Kincardineshire", "Kinross-shire", "Kirkcudbrightshire", "Lanarkshire", "Midlothian", "Moray", "Nairnshire", "Orkney", "Peeblesshire", "Perthshire", "Renfrewshire", "Ross-shire", "Roxburghshire", "Selkirkshire", "Shetland", "Stirlingshire", "Sutherland", "West Lothian","Wigtownshire","Antrim","Armagh","Down","Fermanagh","Londonderry","Tyrone");