Subject: Re: Shared software development

Hello Peter (and the rest of gang):

You are right that more communication would be desirable.
But something is actually happening behind the scene. At
least I can comment on the projects in which I am involved:

1) Catalog update: I think you have all received information
about the updated JEM-X source catalog "cat_combine_02.txt". 
When working on that I communicated a lot with Ken Ebisawa 
and Arash Bodaghee at ISDC. The catalog update was needed in
connection with my light curve work.

2) Source detection. Only minor updates to midisky has happened
since the introduction of the mask support structure in the
detector illumination model. The main effort over the last months 
have actually happened in Valencia where Paul Connell have
taken midisky and transformed it into an ISDC compatible
version "JEMIROS". Just before Christmas Paul sent me back his
first version of JEMIROS which I had hoped to update with
the small changes I made since Paul started his work. 
Unfortunately, first family problems (my mother died on January 
1st) and later troubles getting the light curve program to 
behave have kept me off JEMIROS until now. However, Jerome
have installed Paul software here, so we are ready to go.

Specifically on the mask support structure modelling: one
of Stefans students, Cecilia Kozma, has been working in Stockholm
with the subroutines I developed, so I believe they are now also
part of Stefans source extraction software.

3) Mosaics. Right now I am in daily contact with Roland Walter 
on how to produce the best looking global mosaics showing the
whole Galactic plane. Fortunately ,we have recently acquired a 
very fast multi CPU PC here running linux, and it can create 
images from all the 3000 "Survey" science windows in about 8 
hours. We are now in the sixth such cycle of cleaning iterations. 

4) Light curves. 

Stefan circulated in early December a description of his source 
extraction software. And for my part I have been working with 
a light curve program based on the midisky source illuminaton 
model for the last couple of months. In a mail later today shall 
report in more detail on the status of this software which is 
just now  beginning to give results. Many of the contributions 
we have planned for the Munich workshop will depend on getting 
decent lightcurves and the time pressure to get something out 
is very high. Right now I am optimistic about producing 
acceptable light curves for weak sources, but for strong 
sources the vignetting errors are still quite noticeable.
My main worry now is that for several of the most interesting
projects much of the data are in restricted imaging format,
which my program cannot handle today. 

with best regards

niels