I've just handed in the final version of my MSci thesis! It's the culmination of my fourth-year Physics project on Interpretation of 3D Astronomical Data, in which I was studying a spectral datacube of the NGC 1068 Active Galactic Nucleus, trying to discover the structure and properties of this astronomical object from the redshift and distribution of the spectral emission lines. Sometime soon I will be posting some of the PyRAF and Python datacube analysis code that I developed.
Now I only have to worry about the Project viva, and then three exams from other modules.
Following up on my earlier post on installing IRAF on Ubuntu Edgy, here's a walkthrough for installing PyRAF, a Python shell for IRAF. As part of this we'll have to install STSDAS and TABLES, two popular IRAF packages from STSCI.
A major part of my final year project depends on using IRAF, the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility from NOAO. Although it's installed on the university's UNIX Service, the servers it's on are not particularly fast and have quite a few users, so the interactive bits like DS9 are barely usable over SSH X11 forwarding. Anyway, I thought I'd install it on my own machine to make things easier.
