This morning I am getting back to working with DOLPHOT. On Thursday I began to work my way through the pydolphot tutorial and completed splitting each image up into its component chips. Each image now has 15 sub-images divided into chips. There is something up though as I don’t have the 615 files I would expect out of 41 images. I only count 416 in my folder. I may have to run the program again and check for any errors. For now, I am going to keep going through the program’s steps to familiarize myself with DOLPHOT.

Since I have a lot of images now (416 to be exact), running calcsky (which computes the sky value) and manually entering in the name of each .fits file I want to calculate would take too long. I tried running calcsky with a general term *.chip* but that did not work. I think it just doesn’t recognize that syntax as a fits filename. Because of this, I am going to finish up reading through pydolphot’s instructions for running dolphot manually, but then actually download the pydolphot repo and run that code since it greatly streamlines the process.

I’ve completed my read through of pydolphot’s tutorial so I am going to download it and try to run it.

The pydolphot installation instructions say that they assume a certain directory structure. I am not sure if it is going to mess me up down the line to not have that exact directory structure, but I will roll with it for now.

I went with a different directory structure, placing pydolphot in the folder that contains all of my flc files, so i could call on it like ‘python pydolphot/make_dolparam.py reference_file’

I have spent the last twenty or so minutes working on trying to fix an error of having incorrect tabs or spaces on the pydolphot ‘make_referenceparam.py’ code. I went into the code and noticed that many spaces were used instead of tabs I replaced the spaces with tabs of the same length but the program still is having issues with a block of text around line 271-282 in the code. It keeps giving the same few errors about indents being out of place.

A little closer inspection revealed that I actually just had another chunk of code with spaces instead of tabs. Now that I have fixed all of the spaces, the code gives me a new error. (yay!) I now am having an issue that I kinda knew was going to happen. Since my directory structure is different than the one Dan wrote pydolphot for it isn’t able to find my images. I am going to see if I can fix it.

When I ran the code, I accidentally was in the directory containing all of my raw files, so the code deleted them all Luckily I had them in another folder too so I still have them It is a good lesson to be careful running programs like this in important directories. I know what the issue is now! once these files copy I should be able to have the program find the images.

Ok, I was a little too confident there. Despite thinking I understood what was going on, I spent a while trying to get make_referenceparam to run and it still couldn’t find the images. I am going to have to leave this for now.

Today I have progressed on my understanding of pydolphot (and dolphot in general). I hope that things will continue to clear themselves up as I continue to work on pydolphot with a fresh mind.

Hopefully Thom and I can put our heads together (if not literally maybe at least virtually) and both find solutions to different problems we encounter in dolphot and pydolphot.

I may revisit some of this briefly tomorrow. If so, I’ll post here then. I also hope to have another weekly reflection up either tonight or tomorrow. I head home for a couple weeks next week so I want to think (type)through how I can continue my momentum and connection to the research group while at home.