Anna Wong - Summer 2023 Research Journal

Week 1 - Preparation and examples

I downloaded MobaXTerm and started working through the ROOT tutorial, then discussed the tutorial with my mentor who suggested I start familiarizing myself with ctools' documentation instead.

Week 2 - Preparations and examples cont.

Ruo gave me a 'base code' which reads .xml files of different cosmic ray sources and turns them into .fits files. I ran it on the .xml file for the Crab Nebula, then downloaded DS9 and learned how to open the .fits file to look at the events. I was instructed to create a .xml file for the Crab's background (essentially by opening the original Crab .xml file and deleting the code for the source) and use it to create a .fits file for the background. I then subtracted the background events from the overall events.

Week 3

Ruo showed me how to make histograms of radial distance vs flux for the Crab overall, the Crab background, and the Crab subtract background.

Week 4

June 22 - The code analysis of the second bright spot finished yesterday evening; I opened the resulting .fits file and it was still focused on the galactic center. I also started looking for other supernova remnant sources in the [x] database using [y]'s list of giant molecular clouds.

June 23 - The previous analysis finished overnight, which was too long of a simulation time, so we reduced the time and size of the pointing and ran it again. I narrowed down the other supernova sources to sources that were two degrees or larger, as smaller ones cannot be resolved by MSTs.

Week 5

June 26 - Ran another simulation with the same data and parameters to get a sense of how long it takes. Spent most of the day trying to figure out how to make another graph from a .fits file, this time of energy level vs number of events.

June 27 - I met with Ruo and we modified the parameters of the simulation I ran yesterday, increasing the observation time from one second to two hours and increasing the normalization by a thousand times. I figured out how to access the necessary dimensions of the .fits file for my energy level vs event graph, but didn't sum them across all values of RA and dec, so I worked with other VERITAS students to fix that and produced this graph.

I also generated new .fits files that were 3x3 pixels instead of 300x300, so making a subtraction tomorrow will be easier.

June 28 - I made a presentation for and presented at the VERITAS weekly group meeting. I also worked a bit on the subtraction script. I learned how to send multiple jobs to the cluster and sent four. Each was focused on the MeerKAT 's Galactic Center data; one was background, one was 0.1CU, one was 0.5CU, and one was 10.0CU. This involved creating new .xml files for the program to reference, adding conditional statements to the meerkat_analysis.py script, and creating a shell script that runs the program.

June 29 - The 0.1CU and 0.5CU both worked (and took 4 and 17 seconds respectively) but my 10.0CU had no files. I spent a while troubleshooting this, spoke briefly with Ruo about it, then decided to restart with different values of CU (1, 2, and 4). I cleaned up my meerkat_analysis directory from all the log files from yesterday's attempt. I also went to the Nano Grav and IceCube webinars' watch party.

June 30 - Ruo and I looked over the .fits files generated from the 1CU, 2CU, and 4CU simulations. He gave me two websites that connected brightness (of the MeerKAT data) to the temperature of the SNR. I spent the rest of the day running sims to look at other SNRs in the MeerKAT data while trying to exclude the SGR A complex (it's too bright).

Week 6

July 4 - Worked a bit on the introduction to my final deliverable and ran one pointing at SNR359.0 and two at SNR359.1.

July 6 - The pointing at SNR359.1 was alright! I ran a simulation of the background and also sent two simulations of one of the SNRs above the Galactic Centre (that Kaya mentioned) to the cluster. Went to the talk about grad school; worked on the background subtraction code.

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