REU program at UW Madison

Student: Travis Stadler (North Caroline A & T) / Mentor: Ralf Kotulla (@rkotulla)

1. Download data using querysdss
2. Computing unsharp-masking for frames with unsharp_mask
3. optional: Convert FITS data to png for easier viewing using makequickview
4. Inspect results and come up with list of interesting galaxies.

querysdss takes either a filename as only parameter, or a list of object identifiers (e.g. galaxy name, NGC number, star name, or whatever simbad can resolve into coordinates). In the case of usng a filename as input, this file should contain a list of object identifiers, with one object per line. Empty lines or lines starting starting with # are ignored.

Examples:

Download images for M81, M82, M51 and M42:

querysdss.py m82 m81 m51 m42

Download a object list:

querysdss.py objects.cat

In this case, the objects.cat file should look like this:

M81
M82
M51
# M1
M42

For proper unsharp-masking using gaussian-smoothing, run it like this:

~/reu_sdss/unsharp_mask.py input_gri.fits --size=2,3,5,7,11,15,21,35 --mode=gauss

or alternatively, run a median-filtering algorithm this way:

~/reu_sdss/unsharp_mask.py input_gri.fits --size=3,7,15 --mode=median