Anthony Smith's Research Blog
Surveying the Universe
A galaxy being emitted by a star
Feb 28th
Why is the universe so crowded? This kind of thing is really messing up my data!
Makes me want to work with simulations...
pIDLy: IDL within Python
Jan 31st
Now Python and IDL can talk to each other (okay, Python talks to IDL and IDL does what it's told), using pIDLy (pronounce as you please). I experimented with a few other solutions available online but couldn't get them to work. So I cobbled this one together with surprisingly little trouble, thanks largely to pexpect.
IDL code miscellany
Jan 28th
IDLdoc 3.0 (more info here) gives my badly-written bits of IDL the deceptive appearance of being well designed, useful and user-friendly. So I've made a few available here for your enjoyment.
UKIDSS at ESO
Dec 20th
Just back from my first visit to Garching (near Munich). ESO, to be more specific. The reason for the visit: a three-day workshop on Science from UKIDSS.
Here's the gist of it. Lots of good results already, lots of work in progress, and a sense that UKIDSS has come of age: the needle-in-a-haystack hunters now have enough hay (they hope!) to find some record-breaking needles (the smallest, nearest or furthest known luminiferous objects in the Universe) and the (Galactic or extra-Galactic) Gallup pollers have now canvassed enough individuals (stars or galaxies) to be reasonably confident about the views of the whole population.
I'm one of the extra-Galactic Gallup pollers. Some slides from the talk I gave on the final morning are on my (small but growing!) publications page.
Next tasks:
- Investigate the problem with deblending of large galaxies
- Write paper
- Write thesis
- Get job
Filtering astro-ph with CosmoCoffee
Dec 14th
One of the things mentioned in Sarah Bridle's talk at YAM last week was a filter for arXiv.org provided by CosmoCoffee. I decided to sample it this week.
After creating an account on CosmoCoffee, you will need to edit the keywords in your profile to reflect your interests (well, I did!). Then click on Arxiv new filter and you're off!
Here are my settings:
- Arxives in order of interest: astro-ph
- Arxiv New search key strings: galaxy (redshift )?survey, luminosity (function|density), surface brightness, UKIDSS, UKIRT, VISTA, SDSS, Sloan, WFCAM, near infrared, stellar mass, star formation (rate|history), galax, Bayes, redshift, astro-ph, ADS, extragalactic
And here are the results:
- Monday: 54 new on astro-ph, of which 21 made it through the filter. These were not only filtered but also sorted by CosmoCoffee so the most relevant were listed first. Very useful.
- Tuesday: 76 on astro-ph; 27 on CosmoCoffee. It missed The Future of Cosmology by George Efstathiou, which was a fun read. But I can't think of any way to adjust the CosmoCoffee filter to catch papers like this, without catching loads of other cosmology papers. But in the full astro-ph listings I skimmed over the paper on globular clusters and their host galaxies, which was ranked highly by CosmoCoffee.
- Wednesday: 42 on astro-ph; 14 on CosmoCoffee, filtered and sorted just right.
- Thursday: 52 on astro-ph; 22 on CosmoCoffee. Hmm, wish I knew more about dwarf galaxies.
- Friday: 30 on astro-ph; 7 on CosmoCoffee (must be getting near Christmas). Glad I skimmed through astro-ph, as my filter settings excluded this fascinating article on the history of dark energy. Apparently Newton thought of it (or something like it) 320 years ago!
Conclusion: based on this week's experience, I'm likely to miss interesting and relevant papers if I use either astro-ph or CosmoCoffee ... so I'll use both! Start each day adagio on CosmoCoffee, accelerando poco a poco, then prestissimo through astro-ph.
UKIDSS poster
Dec 10th
Last Friday was the RAS Young Astronomers Meeting up in Edinburgh. I presented a poster, A census of K-band galaxies from the UKIDSS Large Area Survey, which I've just put online on my (very short!) publications page.
Nothing worth reading
Dec 9th
This is the first entry in the new Research Blog, reserved for posts of a tedious, technical or boring nature related to my research in astronomy. See www.anthonysmith.me.uk for (slightly) more exciting posts. None of the information in this post is of any interest.
I live in York and I'm a research fellow in 
