Thesis accepted 
Sunday, October 7, 2007, 01:16 PM - Thesis
Yes, it took a bit, but after a little over 4 years that I started my PhD that I submitted on May 25th 2007, my thesis has been accepted and my degree is to be conferred to me in December of this year. If you want to read my thesis, visit my publications page. I have a number of B5 sized hardcopies of my thesis. If you would like to receive a copy, just let me know.
Post-doc started 
Friday, July 6, 2007, 05:06 PM - General
Last Sunday I officially started my post-doc with Brian Schmidt. First order of business was attending the ASA at Macquarie University in Sydney. This was good fun.
Thesis submitted 
Friday, May 25, 2007, 01:43 PM - General
Yes, today the moment has arrived... I submitted my thesis! After 3 years, 9 months and 12 days I handed in my thesis at the Australian National University for examination!
Compiling external packages of IRAF on a 64bit machine 
Wednesday, February 14, 2007, 04:58 PM - Software
I have been struggling with this for ages, but I would really give my experience to other people what I found out to get some external packages running on a Fedora Core 6 machine, which is 64bit. For this, I downloaded the standard Redhat binaries (note, 32bit!) from iraf.net. When you want to compile the package that has *no* Redhat binaries for it, you can create them by making the following changes. They are quite general. I've tried them for ifocas and local (the local packages we run here). The recipe is the same for all (read below for pkg the package directory name, or the package name, whatever is appropriate):

Add in pkg/lib/mkpkg.inc to every *FLAGS line the following: -m32, so it should look like:
$set XFLAGS = "$(XFLAGS) -p ifocas -m32"
$set XVFLAGS = "$(XVFLAGS) -p ifocas -m32"
$set LFLAGS = "$(LFLAGS) -p ifocas -m32"

(Ifocas is the used package in this example, but you catch my drift.)

Then in both pkg/src/mkpkg and pkg/mkpkg you add -m32 to each line starting with $link, i.e.:
$link x_focas.o libpkg.a -lc -o xx_focas.e -m32

(so, that's two files to be changed!!)

Finally, if it does not exist, create pkg/bin.redhat

Fix up the $hlib/external.pkg as usual...

Then as iraf user go into cl and type:
cd pkg$
mkpkg -p pkg

And it should compile.

If you have a normal makefile, i.e. you need to type something like make or make ALL, just add -m32 to all *FLAGS and it should compile.

Hope this helps all desperate people out there with 64bit machines. Make sure, of course, that you have always the 32bit libraries installed of everything ;)
Gaussianity of the AAOmega cameras 
Tuesday, August 15, 2006, 11:17 AM - Science, Observing
In the AAOmega run of March 2006, we took some standard stars. They were reduced with drcontrol by changing the type from MFFLX to MFOBJECT. In a discussion with Rob Sharp (AAO) he mentioned that it was a good idea to test the Gaussianity of the standard stars throughout the frames. The reason is that the software uses a constant value for the FWHM of the Gaussian throughout the spectral image. This could have major impact on the relative flux calibration. (Absolute flux calibration with a fibre instrument is quite near to impossible.) The results are in the two figures.




The blue camera is quite constant at a FWHM = 3.05 pix and doesn't vary more than 1% between observations. The red arm, on the other hand, varies a lot more! It varies between a FWHM of 3.5 pix (towards the blue end) down to 3.1 pix and ~2% between observations. The measurements were done with some scripts I wrote in IDL. The FWHM and central pixel of the Gaussian are derived from the sum of 51 columns around the indicated points.

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