Yesterday I was able to get some rudimentary catalog matching running, but was feeling very flummoxed on how to proceed, I knew what had to be done, but didn’t think I had the programming chops to do it. It took me all morning and a lot of frustration, but I believe I finally produced a catalog of stars and a way of matching the same sources. The programs I wrote, catmat1,2, and 3 look at the fields, find the stars that are separated by less than half an arc second, delete them from the larger list, average their magnitudes and add them back to the larger list as one object with the average of their WCS coordinates and the average of their magnitudes. Catmat1 found the catalog between ibo01 and ibo02 and catmat2 found the catalog between ibo03 and ibo04. catmat3 looks at the catalog products of catmat1 and 2 and makes a master catalog with both of them. I am planning on using this master catalog to find matches for the 814 stars. There are 9 814 fields, and I haven’t decided exactly how I am going to tackle them. I am kind of fried from a pretty intense morning trying to make catmat work. I am thrilled it is working now, and proud of the on-the-fly learning I was able to do.

We are going to meet with Steve Getty to talk about posters at 3:00, and then I will be back here working on matching the 814 stars to the 606 catalog with some version of catmat. I think that once I have everything matched, graphing of color magnitude should be relatively simple.

An unfortunate thing I realized this morning is that for many of the identified sources for some reason dolphot gives them a magnitude of 99.999 and a count rate of zero. I think Dolphot may have a threshold for the number of flc images it needs to detect a source in to call it a source in the output. Basically because of the fact that a lot of the stars don’t have magnitudes, it means I have about half the data I was hoping to have. This is something to think about next time I am working with Dolphot, but for now, I am not going to backtrack (got a poster to make!)

Oh Boy, this evening has been totally crazy. I am crashing now, will be back tomorrow morning.