Software

A few software packages and tools developed for MCARG

Contour Lines and Area Measurement

In Fall 2021, 3 students in the Merrimack College Computer Science department (Tyler Nourai, Dylan Tivnan, and Evan Williams) developed this tool as part of their capstone project. It is a plugin for AstroImageJ which adds contours to a region of a FITS file and measures the area of each region. This is a task for which the other available tools are unstable, or can't be to used to measure the areas. The intention is to use this tool to study the optical variability of extended sources like M87. Two examples of this tool in action are provided below - the area measurements are not being shown but are simply produced using the native AIJ measurement table. This plugin is released under GPL 3.0: Download this plugin.

M87, using T5 from the iTelescope network, demonstrating the contour line functionality.

Another example of the contour line functionality, this time of a random galaxy in T21 (it happens to be NGC 2692!). This demonstrates the tool is very generic, and doesn't need careful tweaking to produce satisfactory results.

AstroPy Contours

Initially the group developed some Python code (using AstroPy) to draw contours. This code is more flexible, but does not have the simple interactive GUI to do things like cropping and saving the images provided by AIJ. An example of the contours this code can produce are shown below, and the code can be found here.

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