BDNYC at AAS 225

Posted on January 5, 2015 by Adric Riedel

BDNYC (and friends) are out in force for the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society!

Please come see our posters and talks (mostly on Monday). To whet your appetite, or if you missed them, here are some samplers:

Munazza Alam (Monday, 138.40)
High-Resolution Spectral Analysis of Red & Blue L Dwarfs
Sara Camnasio (Monday, 138.39)
Multi-resolution Analysis of Red and Blue L Dwarfs
Kelle Cruz and Stephanie Douglas (Monday, 138.37)
When good fits go wrong: Untangling Physical Parameters of Warm Brown Dwarfs

Stephanie Douglas (Monday 138.19)
Rotation and Activity in Praesepe and the Hyades

Jackie Faherty (Talk, Monday 130.05)
Clouds in the Coldest Brown Dwarfs

Joe Filippazzo (Monday, 138.34)
Fundamental Parameters for an Age Calibrated Sequence of the Lowest Mass Stars to the Highest Mass Planets

Paige Giorla (Monday, 138.44)
T Dwarf Model Fits for Spectral Standards at Low Spectral Resolution
Kay Hiranaka (Talk, Monday 130.04D)
Constraining the Properties of the Dust Haze in the Atmospheres of Young Brown Dwarfs

Erini Lambrides (Thursday, 432.02)
Can 3000 IR spectra unveil the connection between AGN and the interstellar medium of their host galaxies?

Emily Rice (Tuesday, 243.02)
STARtorialist: Astronomy Outreach via Fashion, Sci-Fi, & Pop Culture
Adric Riedel (Monday, 138.38)
The Young and the Red: What we can learn from Young Brown Dwarfs

Using WriteLaTeX for Collaborative Papers

Posted on December 10, 2014 by Adric Riedel

Update: WriteLaTeX is now Overleaf

We all love Google Docs. It's a functional and convenient way to share and collaboratively edit documents across platforms, time zones, and even continents. We in the BDNYC group use it extensively.

But what if you want to write a scientific paper? Google Docs, as awesome as it is, is not much more than a word processor. We want the internal hyperlinks for sections, figures, tables, and citations, elegant mathematical formulae, well-formatted tables, more control over where and how our components are arranged - in a word, LaTeX. Yes, LaTeX has its own host of problems, but it's very good at what it does.

There are a number of collaborative editing projects out there - Authorea springs to mind. But one of the simpler options out there is actually pretty good: WriteLaTeX.
Continue reading →

Example Query: SpeX Prism Spectra for Very Red, Field Age, Early-L Dwarfs

Aside

Here we needed the SpeX Prism spectra for all the field age L0-L5 dwarfs with J-Ks color greater than a certain value that is different for each spectral type.

To perform this query we needed to join the SOURCES, SPECTRAL_TYPES, PHOTOMETRY, and SPECTRA tables by source_id. Then in the 'where' clause, we had to specify:

Our band 1 is 'J' and band 2 is 'Ks' both from system 2 (2MASS) to get the J-Ks color,
The instrument_id for the spectra must be 6 (SpeX),
The gravity must not be $\beta$ or $\gamma$ if it is field age,
And then we joined a bunch of conditionals for each spectral type/color requirement in parentheses with 'or' operators.

import BDdb db = BDdb.get_db('/path/to/Dropbox/BDNYCdb/BDNYC.db') red_field_Ls = db.query.execute("SELECT a.id, a.names, b.spectral_type, b.gravity, (c1.magnitude-c2.magnitude) AS color, d.wavelength, d.flux, d.unc FROM sources a JOIN spectral_types b ON a.id=b.source_id JOIN photometry c1 ON a.id=c1.source_id JOIN photometry c2 ON a.id=c2.source_id JOIN spectra d ON a.id=d.source_id WHERE b.gravity IS NULL AND c1.band='J' AND c1.system=2 AND c2.band='Ks' AND c2.system=2 AND d.instrument_id=6 AND b.regime='OPT' AND ((color>=1.3 AND b.spectral_type=10) OR (color>=1.35 AND b.spectral_type=11) OR (color>=1.48 AND b.spectral_type=12) OR (color>=1.64 AND b.spectral_type=13) OR (color>=1.69 AND b.spectral_type=14) OR (color>=1.72 AND b.spectral_type=15))").fetchall()

This returns a list of the form [source_id, name, optical spectral type, gravity suffix (which should be None), J-Ks color, wavelength array, flux array, uncertainty array]

Example Query: High Resolution NIRSPEC data

Aside

Here we needed the high resolution J band spectra for NIRSPEC orders 61 and 65 for all available objects in the database. In this snippet, we use the dict method instead of the usual query method so we can dump all of our spectra and meta data into a dictionary D.

import BDdb db = BDdb.get_db('/path/to/Dropbox/BDNYCdb/BDNYC.db') D = db.dict.execute("select * from spectra where wavelength_order in (61,65)").fetchall()

Then we can just use a list comprehension to iterate through the list and grab all the data like a Python dictionary with the column names as keys, i.e. D[n]['flux'] gives you the flux array, D[n]['source_id'] the source_id, etc. for the n results in your query.

Documentation using Sphinx

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Will Saunders

Sphinx is a free, online tool that helps generate documentation for primarily Python projects. We use it for HTML format outputs, but it also supports LaTeX, ePub, Texinfo, manual pages, and plain text formats. The markup language of Sphinx is reStructuredText (reST) (for documentation see http://sphinx-doc.org/rest.html). Of Sphinx's many features, the one most useful thus far is its auto-documentation of Python files, the steps of which this post details below.

Sphinx auto-documentation steps:

Install Sphinx at the command line using: easy_install -U Sphinx
Read through the Sphinx documentation at http://sphinx-doc.org/.
Run Sphinx's Getting Started function Sphinx-quickstart to quickly set up directories and configurations. NOTE: Since I have already completed this setup, it DOES NOT need to be run again for the BDNYC documentation.
1. Access the documentation directories in Dropbox through the shared folder BDNYCdb/Documentation
2. The Documentation folder contains the .rst and .py files that Sphinx uses to build documentation. Place any files for which documentation is to be made within that directory since Sphinx automatically looks there.
  
  BDdb.html within the Documentation directories
The index.rst file is the master file that contains the table of contents (known as a TOCtree) for the entire documentation. Within the TOCtree, Sphinx knows that all the files are .rst, so there is no need to specify the file extension or path. The index also serves as a welcome page for users, so it may include an introduction or other information that would be useful for outside reference. Within the TOCtree (and all of reST) indentation and notation is especially important. Below is an example of a functioning TOCtree. .. toctree:: :maxdepth: 2 # blank line BDdb utilities astrotools load_db Database_instructions
The "maxdepth" function specifies the depth of nesting allowed. In order to keep the index clean and aesthetically simple, a maximum of one nested page is reasonable. In other files, however, highly nested pages are not only common, but well-supported by reST.

Screenshot of index.rst
For each item in the TOCtree of the index file, there must be a corresponding .rst file in the main directory for Sphinx to nest within the index HTML file. In the above example, a Database_instructions.rst file might contain in plain English how to interact with the database, while the BDdb.rst file contains the auto-documentation of BDdb.py.
The .rst file within the TOCtree of the index must be formatted like below to correctly call for the Python files. [name of module] ================ # make page header (see http://sphinx-doc.org/rest.html) .. automodule:: [name of Python file w/o extension] :members: # tells Sphinx to pull from the file # blank line :undoc-members: :show-inheritance:

Screenshot of BDdb.rst
The referenced Python files for auto-documentation can either be in located in the main directory, or their location can be specified. Since we will be constantly pushing and pulling from Github, it is best for those doing documentation to change the file path to their local copy of BDdb.py, astrotools.py, etc, before making documentation. This can be achieved as follows:
Open conf.py, which is the configuration file for Sphinx. It was produced during the "quickstart" function to allow easy modifications of aesthetic features (i.e., theme, font), and facilitate the HTML building process.
1. Change the file path in line 21 to the applicable local copy.
2. Comment out the file path of previous users in order to make it easier for others to update documentation.
In order to make the HTML files, move Terminal to the directory of the documentation, i.e., '.../Dropbox/BDNYCdb/Documentation' and run make html.
1. The make htmlfunction comes build-in through running "quickstart" and uses the makefile in the main directory. It can take other functions as well, including make clean, which deletes the entire contents of the "build" directory.
2. Sphinx should put the generated HTML files in the /_build/html directory.
To make the HTML files live on BDNYC.org/database, use the application Cyberduck, which can be downloaded at http://cyberduck.en.softonic.com/mac.
1. Click "Open Connection" and put in the server, username, and password.
2. Drag and drop any .rst and HTML files that were modified into the appropriate directory and the documentation should go live immediately!

References:

http://sphinx-doc.org/ -- Sphinx documentation homepage

http://sphinx-doc.org/contents.html -- Outline of Sphinx documentation

http://sphinx-doc.org/rest.html -- Using reStructuredText in Sphinx

http://sphinx-doc.org/ext/autodoc.html -- Auto-documentation documentation

http://cyberduck.en.softonic.com/mac -- Download Cyberduck

Rotational and Vibrational Energy of Diatomic Molecules

Posted on August 1, 2014 by Camilla Buzard

Molecules can store energy in 4 different ways: translation (whole molecule moves in each of 3 Cartesian coordinates), rotation (whole molecule rotates—linear molecules can rotate around 2 axes, nonlinear around all 3 axes), vibration (bonds stretch and contract—3N-5 kinds of vibrations for linear molecules, 3N-6 for nonlinear), and electronic (ground state vs. excited). The energy absorbed in electronic transitions is usually in the UV-visible range, that for vibrations is in the IR range, for rotations in the microwave range, and the transition energy for translations is basically infinitesimal. This is because electronic transitions require the most energy, then vibrations, rotations and finally translations require the least. With high enough resolution, rotational transitions can be seen in vibrational spectra, with the rotational transitions giving structure to the vibrational absorption peaks.

Figure 1: An energy diagram showing the relative energies for rotational, vibrational, and electronic transitions and how they overlap.³

The energy of rotational and vibrational levels can be calculated separately and summed. Vibrations can be modeled using the simple harmonic oscillator—the potential energy of which comes from Hooke’s law. Rotational energy of a molecule can be calculated by assuming the molecule acts as a rigid rotor and solving the corresponding Schrodinger Equation. Both of these types of energy are quantized, which accounts for the vibrational (v) and rotational (J) quantum levels in the equation.

This equation will give energy levels in Joules. Vibrational spectroscopists generally use units of wavenumbers, or cm^-1, though, which can be found by dividing the entire equation by hc.

where

and

v: vibration quantum number (0,1,2,…)
J: rotation quantum number (0,1,2,…)
k: spring constant/strength of bond
μ: reduced mass
I: moment of inertia, where is bond length
B: rotational constant

I began looking into this to explain why multiple carbon monoxide absorption peaks appeared where they did in my near-IR spectra at 2.29 and 2.32 microns or 4367 and 4310 cm^-1. I was able to calculate the correct 2.29 μm peak by subtracting the energy where v=0 and J=8 from the energy where v=2 and J=10. This means that these peaks are due to the first vibrational overtone of CO, i.e. Δv=2 instead of 1. The peak at 2.32 and any other peaks around the same area can be found by going from different rotational energy states, 6 to 8, 4 to 6, etc. ΔJ for CO is usually ±2 because it is a linear molecule.

McQuarrie, Donald A. Quantum Chemistry. 2^nd ed. Sausalito: University Science Books, 2008.
Atkins, P.; de Paula, J. Physical Chemistry. 8^th ed. New York: W. H. Freeman and Company, 2006.
“Electronic Spectra of Organic Molecules”. Organic Chemistry. http://www.organicchemistry.com/electronic-spectra-in-raman-spectroscopy/. Accessed July 24, 2014.

On solving the Rigid Rotor Schrodinger Equation:

http://chemwiki.ucdavis.edu/Physical_Chemistry/Quantum_Mechanics/Quantum_States_of_Atoms_and_Molecules/7._Rotational_States/Solving_the_Rigid_Rotor_Schrödinger_Equation

Special thanks to Professor Andrew Crowther.

Adding Spectra to the BDNYC Data Archive

Posted on May 21, 2014 by Joe Filippazzo

Once your BDNYC development environment is all setup, adding spectra to the database is relatively simple and all done through Terminal.

Open Terminal and then launch iPython from the command line with ipython --pylab.

Next, import the BDdb module and load the actual database with:

import BDdb db = BDdb.get_db('/Users/your_computer/Dropbox/BDNYCdb/BDNYC.db')

Now you're all set to start adding spectra. There are two types of files that we typically use for spectra: ascii files and FITS files.

Adding ASCII Files

Ascii files are just text files with two or three columns of data, which should always be the wavelength, flux and (if three columns) the uncertainty values at each point. Adding this data is super simple:

db.add_ascii('/path/to/the/ascii/file', source_id)

So how do you find the source_id for your object? Just use the identify() function. For example, say my object is '2MASS J00361617+1821104'. I would search by the first four digits of the object name, in this case:

db.identify('0036')

This may return a number of different sources, all with '0036' appearing somewhere in their name, so I would then visually inspect to find the source I'm looking for. In this case, the source_id is 86.

The file path and the source_id are the only required information to provide to add this type of data though the more columns you can complete the better! The values of the optional columns can just be entered in the function as arguments, e.g. telescope_id=6. The other columns include:

Argument	Description
wavelength_units	Units of the wavelength axis, e.g. 'um' for microns, 'A' for angstroms
flux_units	Units of the flux axis, e.g. 'erg/s/cm2/A', 'W/m2/A', 'Jy', etc.
wavelength_order	For high resolution data only, e.g. 58, 59, 60, etc.
publication_id	The id from the PUBLICATIONS table that corresponds to the paper where the data was first published.
obs_date	The date of the observations as YYYY-MM-DD
instrument_id	The id from the INSTRUMENTS table that corresponds to the instrument used to record the spectrum.
telescope_id	The id from the TELESCOPES table that corresponds to the telescope used to record the spectrum.
mode_id	The id from the MODES table that corresponds to the instrument mode used to record the spectrum.
airmass	The airmass at the time the spectrum was recorded, which is any value between 0 and 2.
comment	Comments about the spectrum that a future user of the data might need to know!

So as an example, if I want to add a NIR spectrum to the database taken with the SpeX Prism instrument on the NASA IRTF, my code should look like:

db.add_ascii('/Users/Joe/Desktop/NIR_spectra/2m0036_nir.txt', 86, telescope_id=7, instrument_id=6, mode_id=1, airmass=1.0263, obs_date='2013-01-17)

Note: the order of the optional arguments does not matter!

How do you know the telescope_id, instrument_id, mode_id, or publication_id? You can browse these tables in Terminal by running the table name as a method on the database instance or by searching the table with some keyword.

For example db.instruments() will show you every instrument_id and name. But db.instruments('SpeX') will return only those records that have 'spex' in the name.

The naming convention for publications is the first four letters of the first author's last name and then the two digit year. So I could try db.publications('Kirk01') to find Kirkpatrick et al. 2001 or just db.publications('Kirk') to see all Kirkpatrick first author publications.

Otherwise, just launch the SQLite Database Browser and load the appropriate table.

All the other values should be in the ascii filename (e.g. 2m0036_2013may02_58.txt might be the object name, obs_date and wavelength_order) or in the ascii file itself above the data columns. Sometimes you might just know the correct information and can add it where possible. Otherwise you can always just leave these blank.

Add FITS Files

Adding spectra in FITS files works exactly the same way but with a little more automation.

Just like adding an ascii file above, you simply do:

db.add_fits('/path/to/the/fits/file.fits', source_id)

The automation comes in since many FITS files have a metadata "header" with common keys like 'OBS_DATE', 'TELESCOP', 'INSTRUME', etc., which BDdb automatically tries to pull out and insert into our new spectrum record.

However, you can still fill in blanks and/or override the automation by simply adding in the optional arguments as we did above with db.add_ascii().

OOPS! Don't panic!

If anything gets entered incorrectly, remember that you can always just open up the SQLite Database Browser, navigate to the record you just added in the SPECTRA table, and double-click the cells you need to edit.

Or you can just select the row of your erroneous record and click the Delete Record button, and then try adding the spectrum again.

Use of the DISTINCT function in an SQLite query

Posted on March 21, 2014 by Paige Giorla

When using an sqlite query to pull from our database, you may run into the issue where you only want to see the desired field entry once, and the resulting list or dictionary is giving it to you multiple times.

An Example

Say you want to get the source_id from the spectra table where the spectral_type is an L dwarf and the spectra regime is NIR. Meaning, you want to know which L dwarfs we have NIR spectra for. Well, the output will give you a list of all of the entries we have spectra for, even if some entries overlap on source_id. Each source_id will show up in the list per the number of separate NIR spectra we have for that object. If you only want to see the source_id once, we can use a function tag called DISTINCT. It follows like:

SELECT DISTINCT sp.source_id FROM spectra AS sp JOIN spectral_types AS spt ON spt.source_id=sp.source_id WHERE spt.spectral_type BETWEEN 10 AND 19 AND sp.regime='NIR'

(See the joining tables post if confused on how to do so.)

*NOTE: Here I used another function BETWEEN instead of writing out spt.spectral_type>=10 AND spt.spectral_type<20

Using astroquery

Posted on March 1, 2014 by Adric Riedel

If you're like me, you've spent a lot of time downloading a table from VizieR, and then trying to insert it into whatever database or table you are currently using. It's annoying, particularly because VizieR either won't output information in a machine-readable format or won't put an empty line into a massive list of results when there's no match in the catalog.
Astroquery is better. It's a python package affiliated with astropy that can grab data from all your favorite catalog servers (Vizier, SIMBAD, IRSA, NED, etc) directly, and use it; combine that with Astropy's ability (or Python's capacity) to print out tables to files, and it's a lot easier to write a script to do it all for you.

Astroquery is in the Python Package Index, so you can install and update it with
pip install astroquery

You also need the 'requests' module to do the web-interfacing (and Astropy v3); it's available on the Python Package Index and comes preloaded in Anaconda. Using it is simple (this part is almost entirely taken from their pages on using VizieR and IRSA):
Continue reading →

Uncertainty Propagation

Posted on February 14, 2014 by Joe Filippazzo

All observations have associated uncertainties which must be propagated through your analysis to a an uncertainty on a final result. The principle of uncertainty propagation is fairly simple:

$\sigma_x^2 = \sigma_u^2\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial u}\right)^2 + \sigma_v^2\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial v}\right)^2+\dots +2\sigma_{uv}^2\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial u}\right)\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial v}\right)+\dots$

The first two terms on the right are the averages of the squares of the deviations in x produced by the uncertainties in observables u and v respectively. The third term on the right is the average of the cross terms, which cancel out if u and v are uncorrelated. Thus in most situations, a reasonable approximation is:

$\sigma_x^2 = \sum\limits_u\sigma_u^2\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial u}\right)^2$

Examples

A typical situation is the sum of two observables each with a multiplicative factor:

$x=au+bv$

$\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial u}\right)=a,\hspace{10pt}\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial v}\right)=b$

$\sigma_x = \sqrt{\sigma_u^2a^2 + \sigma_v^2b^2}$

which is the oft used "summing in quadrature."

Perhaps you have the product of two observables:

$x=auv+b$

$\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial u}\right)=av,\hspace{10pt}\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial v}\right)=au$

$\sigma_x = \sqrt{\sigma_u^2(av)^2 + \sigma_v^2(au)^2}=a\sqrt{\sigma_u^2v^2 + \sigma_v^2u^2}$

Finally, perhaps you have the inverse of one observable times the exponential of another:

$x=\frac{a}{u}e^{bv}$

$\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial u}\right)=\left(-\frac{a}{u^2}\right)e^{bv},\hspace{10pt}\left(\frac{\partial x}{\partial v}\right)=\frac{a}{u}be^{bv}$

$\sigma_x = \sqrt{\sigma_u^2\left(\frac{a}{u^2}e^{bv}\right)^2 + \sigma_v^2\left(\frac{a}{u}be^{bv}\right)^2}=\frac{a}{u}e^{bv}\sqrt{\frac{\sigma_u^2}{u^2}+\sigma_v^2b^2}$

Easy!