The aim of this project is to give students an opportunity to experiment with real-world time-series data (AMON) and star catalog data. Besides being an exercise for programmers, this project has the potential to create a useful tool for the analysis of AMON data.
The assignment requires students first to analyze AMON data for peaks and then associate these peaks with stars in the detector’s field for view. These associations should be saved in a database that would allow showing stars associated with ADC count peaks, and importantly peaks associated with stars.
The result of this project should be a database associating stars and peaks and at least simple visualizations. Ideally, an interactive interface that allows to search for peaks and to visualize them, list associated stars. On the other hand, it should also allow to search for a star and visualize associated peaks. The resulting software should be capable of visualizing the distribution of source count, distribution of magnitude – both are in relation to some temporal or spatial window.
An example of a star in AMON-2 data was shown in the LAB exercise “Observing variations in the data”. Students can use this as the bases for the development of their method. The Jupyter notebook for this exercise is available here:
https://git.kpi.fei.tuke.sk/svd/lab-amon/-/blob/master/Observing%20variations%20in%20the%20data.ipynb
The input data of this project consist of a star catalogue and AMON detector data. The AMON data will be provided to students here, and the catalogue data will need to be downloaded by students from an archive such as VizierR. It is up to the students to choose the star catalogue. It could be Gaia EDR3, Tycho, Hipparcos.
The AMON SN02 data for this project can be download from the following address:
http://data.spaceforum.sk/tsf/svd/amon/all_sn02_data/sn02_data.csv
The table of AMON detectors was provided along with the AMON-focused lab:
https://git.kpi.fei.tuke.sk/svd/lab-amon/-/raw/master/data/detectors.csv
Some steps of the work
- Development of a method for detection of stars based on peaks in AMON’s ADC count data
- Development of code capable of finding the skymap section observed by AMON in a star catalogue.
- Development of visualization methods – Visualization of the ADC counts, distribution of the number of sources, distribution of the magnitude
- Preparation of a database of detected starts by processing the whole AMON SN02 dataset. The processing should be easily replicable for other AMON detectors.
- Development of user interface that allows to search the database and visualize the results.
- Preparation of a presentation of the results.
Computational resources
A remote computer for long-running code can be provided to students after discussion.
Semester 2020/2021
This project is assigned to Ján Červeňák and Bc. Igor Sivý.
Links/Resources
The current version of the AMON-net visualizer could serve as an inspiration for this work. Specifically, the night analysis tool. An example of the night with an observation of a star in the AMON-net visualizer is at the following address: http://147.213.198.111/night-analysis/night/2?values=2017-11-16
This tool was created by Michal Mašlanka as a part of his diploma thesis. Michal has also implemented the Poisson filter algorithm, which might be useful for star detection. The thesis is available here: https://1drv.ms/b/s!AooQWbEURWQJhNBR6lLU8pnW6iW7yg