Wednesday, July 14, 2010

A big update for little progress

I'm afraid I haven't updated in over a week because the process I've been going through has been extremely slow-going.

After the data was inserted into the RCS2 background last week, I've worked to run Beth's search algorithm on this data. But something's not working right. So, mostly I've been running tests, and debugging small things that I understand. Meanwhile, Beth has been working with me to try to figure out what the bigger problem is.

Here's how we know something's wrong: we run the search code, and when it detects something, it spits out information about that detection to an output file, (RA, Dec, distance modulus...). But the detections have been funky. Either they output nonsensical values, or output the same values over and over, or output values that do not relate to our generated fakes, (this is the latest problem). The code takes forever to run, and so its been a process of trying to debug, waiting a while, and seeing that it's still not right.

So, to maintain my sanity, I've been trying to do other things to keep busy. Yesterday I converted my code to use SDSS data as background, instead of RCS2. Today, I'm working on adding to my LaTeX document with updates from the past few weeks. It's pretty crazy to read about what I was doing 4 weeks ago, and realizing how far I've come...

Hopefully this search code debugging business will straighten itself out soon. Ultimately, we'd like to use it to test the detectability of Stealths, and figure out which galaxies we could be missing completely with current methods of detection.

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