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Observational Techniques: Assignment 1

Observational Techniques: Assignment 1


Aims

The aim of this assignment is to teach you how to carry out a very common programming task: reading in a bunch of data from a text file, doing something with it then writing the results out again.

It's also a chance to practice the celestial coordinates and brightness scales things we learned in the first lecture.

Your Mission, should you choose to accept it

You have an observing run coming up on the AAT. You wish to observe a sample of micro-quasars. The goal of the assignment is to write a computer program which will select this sample for you.

You will pick the micro-quasars to observe from a rather large catalogue, which can be found here:

Micro-quasar Catalogue (2.8Mb)

The catalogue is an ASCII (text) file - you can inspect it with a normal text editor. It contains the following columns:

You want to pick out the best targets to observe from this catalogue. To be a good target, a micro-quasar must pass the following two tests:

In principle, you could just go through the catalogue manually and pick out the best sources. But the catalogue is very large - it contains 50,000 entries. Thus to find the best targets, you will need to write a computer program.

What to Submit

The submission deadline is mid-day on Thursday 19th April. You should submit two things (by e-mail to me):

Example Programs

To get you started, here is a simple example program which does many of the basic tasks you will need to solve this problem:

Example Program: IO_demo.py

To run the program you will need to put a data file called data.d in the same directory: here is a suitable data file.

You may (or may not) also be interested in the program which I wrote to generate the synthetic micro-quasar catalogue. It's not really relevant to this assignment, but some of the things I do in this program will be very relevant in future assignments.

I will be in my Stromlo office on Monday and Thursday morning if you'd like help with writing this program. Otherwise you can contact me by e-mail.