Resources

Getting Started

Click on the link above to see the latest Evernote guide for getting started with the research group.

Computing Resources

Text editors

emacs is my text editor of choice

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/

http://www.physics.hmc.edu/Astronomy/Emain.html

A few ways to access it:

     emacs filename &

will open another window with the editor

     emacs -nw filename &

will keep emacs in the terminal

Other text editors you can try are vi (or vim), Textmate or Atom.


Imaging

DS9 is often a required tool for astrophysical imaging

http://ds9.si.edu/site/Home.html

This is a tool for viewing images from .fits files; note that it does not work on ALL fits files, just those that store image data.

To open a file, type the following at the command line:

     ds9 my_favorite_image.fits &

Here’s a DS9 tutorial I wrote in college:

http://www.physics.hmc.edu/Astronomy/ds9main.html


Chandra Data Reduction and Analysis


CIAO

You will be using a data reduction software package called CIAO, created by CXC. Their online help pages are written as step-by-step tutorials called “science threads"

Introductory threads : http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/threads/intro.html

More detailed science threads, sorted by category : http://cxc.harvard.edu/ciao/threads/index.html


Chaser

This is an online tool for searching the set of all Chandra observations and the Chandra archive

http://cda.harvard.edu/chaser/


Interactive Spectral Interpretation System (ISIS)

You will need this tool for analyzing high resolution spectroscopic data from Chandra.

For all software used within our group, we need the latest versions of S-lang and the Remeis ISIS scripts. I have created detailed instructions for a clean Linux install here: https://www.evernote.com/l/ASYR3kI8V_NEfZvYKIYhZULCWAhXFREhOl0


For all other users

Tutorials for installing this tool:

You will also need to download and set up the Remeis ISIS scripts. Follow the directions here: http://www.sternwarte.uni-erlangen.de/isis/


Links to many tutorials and presentations on how to use ISIS can be found on the 2015 workshop website:

http://space.mit.edu/cxc/isis2015/