SS433. And Friends.

My bane at Brandeis this Summer is the innocuously named 'AIPS', a piece of software written by the National Radio Astronomy Organization with the ability to take in raw data from the Very Large Array and other assorted radio telescope arrays, and give unto the user the power to calibrate this data.

And what, you ask, is the need of calibration? The fact of the matter is, there are an innumerable number of factors - air pressure, humidity, mood of the deities, wind currents - that cannot conceivably be predicted by any theoretical means in advance, and these quite drastically affect the values the telescopes record. Hence, to make some sense out of the clearly tampered numbers flowing in, astrophysicists hit upon the brilliant (read: obvious) idea of observing, concurrent with every experiment, a few sources whose properties are well known - calibrator sources, listed here. Thus, those interpreting the data can take the recorded data for the calibrators, compare them to standard values and infer quite exactly what kind of funk, depression or manic high the telescope was on at the time of the experiment. This information is then use to correct the data the telescope provides on whatever object astronomers were interested in at the time.

Smart, eh?

Now that I have explained the 'what' and the 'how', let me expand upon the 'wtf'. Problem is, the program written to do this calibration - AIPS - is ancient. Written in FORTRAN-77, if you please. The interface is antique and the sheer pain of learning its ropes is excruciating. I could leave you with an example of its painfulness and horridity and stupendouslame-ity, but I won't. Because I'm kind, yes....but primarily because I want to type as little of that shit as I can. I shall say, however, that just to input data, I have to simulate a Tape Drive. Sigh.

The other piece of software I'm working with these days is DIFMAP, which takes calibrated data and does fancy algorithms on it to give you 'teh pics' of the source. I've just made my first recognizable picture of SS433, the object I'm going to spend the rest of the summer looking at, and frankly...it's quite pretty. Wait, I'll post it.

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