Yesterday I ended my workday with what I thought was an output for dolphot. There were new folders in my working directory that looked like dolphot results. They were empty when I opened them in atom, but I assumed that was an issue with atom and not them. Today, I checked them though, and they are truly empty. I ran dolphot again a few times and I added the PSFs (pretty important step I neglected yesterday). Now what I am thinking is that dolphot takes a really long time to run. Dolphot has been using over 90% of my cpu for the last two hours just running the photometry. looking in phot.log, I can see that it has gone through some of the preliminary steps and identified 124 stars for alignment. It is now on the “finding stars” step and keeps writing a new dot every half hour or so. I now have “Finding Stars: …” I am going to see if I can find some parameter I could tweak that may make it go faster. This is the photometry for one out of the 13 groups that we have of NGC6819, so I am a little baffled at how long it is taking. I generally distrust programs that take a really long time because they encounter little errors after running for two hours and then you don’t get anything out of them.

update: Despite running FOREVER, dolphot did work eventually. One of the reasons why it took so long was that it was running a few times since I started some in the background and didnt end them. I am running the make_photfits.py pydolphot command now and hoping it will give me something nice that I can have as justification for continuing to spend my time on dolphot.

make_photfits worked for me, but the file is a fits file but not an image. I have to leave this for now, maybe I will be able to spend more time today. if not, ill be back tomorrow.

SEP for results by the end of the summer?

Dr. G emailed me and Thom this morning suggesting we move to the aperture photometry program SEP if getting Dolphot to run continues to allude us. Although I feel closer than ever to getting dolphot to run, the current issues and inevitable future issues that will no doubt pop up with this complex program may outweigh the benefits to using it. I am going to do some reading about SEP, as I think it will be helpful to learn about and I have to wait for dolphot to finish anyway.