HG-WELS Spring work

Task One: Wiki & Excel training

Go and watch the videos on the wiki, linked from the top of this page: Guide to NITARP participants for use of the wiki. Quick victory!

Are you comfortable moving between plain text and Excel files? This always seems to cause a lot of problems, with every single NITARP team I have ever worked with, but I don't know how to get around it. IPAC table format is used a lot with IPAC-related archives and tools, but it has a file extension not commonly accepted by either Windows or Mac machines, so you have to know how to help your computer deal with these files. If you are not super, super comfortable with this, you need to be, especially in the context of your (most likely Windows) laptop and how it handles these files. Watch this video on moving between tbl files and xls. This was originally created for a 2011 team, so it contains some extraneous information, but the fundamental principles still apply (and you can tell I'm trying to be very, very patient and very, very complete in my explanations... because I have explained this so. many. times. And so many teams have gotten this explanation at one time and completely forgotten everything about it 2 months later.).

The video does not cover *exporting* the file as a plain text file, but you can do that too. And we will.

Task Two: Assemble Target Lists

We need to take the source lists we have from de la Reza, Carlberg's paper, and Carlberg's email and merge it into one master catalog, one line per source, keeping track of where the sources appear. This catalog should include RA and Dec. This catalog can be plain text or Excel, either one, but since you and your students are most likely going to be using Excel, might as well start now to assemble the catalog into Excel.

We need to have an IPAC Table version of this catalog so that we can use it to search in IRSA services, so once we have the Excel spreadsheet assembled, we will need to *export* a clean text file from Excel that can be interpreted as a tbl file.

de la Reza 1998 has this table: http://iopscience.iop.org/1538-4357/482/1/L77/fulltext/5120.text.html#tbls which gives just source names, not coordinates. I took these source names and ran them automagically through a service here at IPAC that resolves the names using SIMBAD. SIMBAD tabulates data, but is notoriously unreliable at doing so. Don't believe any Vmags, types, or classifications of objects you find as part of their 'basic data.' SIMBAD provides links back to articles (and the data tables therein), though, which is, in general, far more useful. In SIMBAD, you can search by position, so you can find out, e.g., what other named objects are near to a region you care about. There may be other useful papers calling objects near your targeted region by those other names, rather than the name you're using; if you search in ADS just by one name, you may miss papers calling the object by a different name, and this is not an issue when you search in SIMBAD. SIMBAD also does pretty well at, given a name, getting good coordinates for it, providing it can find the name. File:Delarezawcoords.txt is my automatically generated version. Did I grab all the objects (e.g., compare total number of sources in the de la Reza table and mine)? Do all of them have coordinates? Spot check a few (e.g., pick 5 randomly from the list, not just the top 5) by searching on their names manually in SIMBAD. Did I get the coordinates right? Can you figure out how to fill in the coordinates for the missing object(s)?

Task Three: Resolution issues

We need to start to develop some instincts about spatial resolution, specifically IRAS and WISE. HG-WELS Resolution Worksheet