i <3 lacosmic

Today:

Several important things got done today.

1. We chose the new .opt files to finish the rest of the analysis. There wasn't much difference between the images made from the new vs. old .opts but we figured if anything the new ones are more thorough.

2. Dave suggested that using a maximum gain and read noise shouldn't matter if all values are pretty close together. I think I'll use a median just to be sure. But that means the images we're looking at to make these decisions are more or less good ones.

3. Beth and I took a look at the averaged stack I had made before and hadn't liked because it looked terrible--LOTS of rows of bad pixels. We're thinking it can be salvaged with a bad pixel map to allow us to ignore the gross stuff.

4. I successfully ran lacosmic to get rid of bad pixels and cosmic rays and it worked super well as far as I can tell. The masks it output are very pretty. One problem: lacosmic sets the bad stuff equal to 1. According to Dave, swarp needs the bad pixels and cosmic rays to be equal to 0 and everything else equal to 1. (Opposite what lacosmic did.) So I'm writing a few lines of code to reverse this.

5. I made some more progress on the calibration code with Beth's help. I got her code up and running, so I now have a more robust calculation for the linear fit in zp-color space. The slope is still small so everything still looks good. I won't do much more with this yet since I'm anticipating better data to calibrate by Friday.

Tonight
1. lacosmic the r-band images.
2. Makes MEFs of the masks/cleaned images?

Tomorrow.

1. Explore weighted maps.
2. Swarp stacks average-style with the help of the new maps.
3. Get ready to DAOphot.


By Friday:

1. DAOphot averaged stacks.
2. Admire the beautiful CMD that goes to 26.5 mag.


Beth's thesis suggestion:

Star formation history of Wil1.