In order to reduce the data for my PhD-Thesis, I had to write a software package to reduce speckle-interferometric data and find binaries. Since this package is still useful in the age of Adaptive Optics, it can now be found on the software pages of the Center for Adaptive Optics. Of course, the most up-to-date version is on github.
If you watch binary stars long enough, you will see that they
move. With enough data, it is possible to determine their
orbit. This is useful if you want to know the mass of the
stars. The mass of a young star is very important to see if
it's growing properly.
My softare for this task was originally written in IDL, but
I'm currently rewriting it in Python.
Both versions can be found on
github.
Another project I was working on is Starfinder, a very ...err... promising program to search for and measure the positions and fluxes of stars in images obtained with the help of Adaptive Optics.
My software to prepare MIDI (and other) observations is cheddar.
The software to reduce the observations afterwards is MIA+EWS.
My page about image reconstruction with MATISSE.
My contribution to the METIS simulator was a module to
simulate the LM-spectrograph.
You can find it on
github
When I got my wheelmouse (that's a computer-mouse with a scrollwheel, not a mouse in a wheelchair), I became addicted in about 15 minutes. Unfortunately, it took much longer to teach all the important programs what to do with it. An especially stubborn program was xv, my favourite image-viewing program. I finally decided to do it myself and wrote a patch for it. The patched version allows you to use the wheel to scroll in the file lists, the text view, the visual schnauzer, and the dials in several windows.
To use it, you need the sources for xv 3.10a (surprise!), and you should apply at least the following patches:
Finally, you have to download my mousewheel-patch and apply it using:
patch < xv-mousewheel.patch
Then compile and install xv as described in its documentation.
Rainer Köhler