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| Project Title | Automation of Data Reduction and Analysis for Astronomy |
| Summary | Small astronomical data sets are usually reduced and analyzed "by hand". This is time consuming for large surveys. The student carrying out this work will be writing a code to automate the process, using routines from the IRAF library to enable survey operations at local observatories. As these datasets can be quite large, coarse grained parallel programming techniques will be used. |
| Job Description | The student will begin by writing a serial code to reduce and perform coarse analysis of observational data. A point source function (PSF) convolution algorithm will be developed using routines from the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility (IRAF -- a collection of routines and programs which can be used interactively, in scripts, or called directly by other programs). This will allow images taken of the same portion of the sky, under different conditions and at different times to matched, in order to find changes (which correspond to asteroids, supernovas, variable stars and other interesting astrophysical objects). Parallelization of the code (with particular attention to I/O) such that data can be reduced within 8 hours of observation is the ultimate goal. A reduction and analysis pipeline/code such as this will allow changes in the sky to be quickly found such that telescope time can be quickly re-allocated to make more additional observations. |
| Conditions/Qualifications | Knowledge in the use of IRAF (interactive use is sufficient) and a programming language (FORTRAN, C, C++, PYTHON, etc). |
| Start Date | 06/09/2014 |
| End Date | 05/31/2015 |
| Location | Astronomy/Astrophysics Research Group Department of Physics and Astronomy Austin Peay State University 601 College Street Clarksville, TN 37044 |
| Interns | Deborah Gulledge
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