New coalignment code

pixshift has been giving me issues for a long, long time. It finally came to a head, though, when nothing I did could make l001 "work". It turns out, when you do cross-correlation analysis, you're really only interested in the most correlated pixel, NOT the junk around it - the junk around it only provides a second-order correction.

Well, cross_cor_taylor.pro, a tool from the solar physics community, does exactly that. And it works far, far better than my hacked-together pixshift code. A lesson I should always take to heart: don't rewrite code if it's out there. Of course, if I'd known it was out there, I wouldn't have rewritten it....

This is how good it looks now:

(the circle has radius 6", or 1-sigma)

Flow Charts

Made with this code and graphviz.

Calibration: As good as it's gonna get

BGPS vs BGPSv2 in Cyg X

BGPS vs BGPSv2 in IRDC1 (Rathborne)

BGPS vs BGPSv2 in l=44 (comparison is SIMBA, not MAMBO)

Calibration Offsets Revisited

The agreement with Motte et al 2007 is now perfect with a vertical ADDITIVE offset instead of the annoying multiplicative offset. An additive offset can trivially be accounted for by a spatial transfer function. As is evident in the difference images, the MAMBO data appears to sit on a plateau.

Cygnus X:
BGPSV1:

BGPSV2:

Bolocat v1-v2 comparison with new calibration

I re-examined the Bolocat data on l351 after re-running the pipeline with the new calibration curve. The change wasn't all that great. See this post for a brief description of the procedure.

In the data below, I've fit the residuals as a function of v1.0.2 flux density in an aperture (source mask) with a line. The slope of the line should ideally be zero - that would indicate a multiplicative offset is an acceptable correction.

Nicely, in the 40" aperture case, I see no reason to exclude the m=0 case. For the most reliable data - the 13pca - the slope is rather small and the "correction factor" is disturbingly close to what we recommended (1.5). We have no right to be that lucky...

...and so perhaps wer are not. The source mask includes more area and therefore is more sensitive to extended flux recovery. The slopes are not consistent with 0 - just look at the data above and below 2 Jy to see that there is a difference. The multiplicative correction of 1.5 is decent for a pretty wide range of flux densities, but is inadequate for the brightest sources. This is somewhat interesting... it implies that the brightest sources also lie on the highest backgrounds.

You might note that the brightest source has a smaller correction factor in both apertures. It's not clear why that is the case, but I don't think it's enough to call it a trend yet - wait for the full 8000-source comparison first.


Why is there so much scatter? Not entirely clear, but the scatter is primarily at low S/N.

Here are the same for all of the data reduced up to this point:

Final calibration curves (yeah... sure)

I've finished rederiving the calibration curves self-consistently. These will now be applied to the data....

V1 vs V2: Calibration Curves

Why did we find a factor ~1.8 in the previous post? Well, for starters we used a calibration curve that was based off of 'masking' and other tricky techniques.

The calibration curves below are the first ever produced self-consistently, i.e. using the EXACT same pipeline with the EXACT same parameters as the science data. No hacks were needed to produce these*. The recovered Volts/Jy are substantially higher than BGPSv1 and ALSO higher than the curve used about a year ago in an attempt to explain the v1 flux discrepancy.

Remember that a higher calibration curve means a LOWER recovered flux. I haven't finished the check, but odds are pretty good that applying these self-consistent cal curves will reduce the v2 data to be about 1.5.