16 June, 2022
Song of the Day: When the Levee Breaks - Led Zeppelin
Today, I spent a day in the life of a programmer. Jorge hadn’t been able to process the data for Blue from yesterday yet, so all there was for me to do was to continue working on skyan.
I had a great time. I got to crank up the music in my headphones and just write and test my code.
From the start, it required very few modifications to what I wrote yesterday to actually interface with the images. I established a basic terminal output, with the celestial sphere laid out in a 360 by 180 grid, for RA and Dec. I used 0s to indicate that a particular section was free of images, and 1s to indicate that a portion of sky was contained inside at least on of the images that I loaded in. Here is one of the runs:
Once I had the basic version up and running, and with the approval of my mentor, I proceeded to utilize the Python Pillow library to generate images to serve as heatmaps. After some setup, this was the result:
Here, the diameter of the circles corresponds to the FOV of the camera used to take the images. After reaching this point, my mentor recommended that I modify the algorithm to match the rectangular images that I was using. This bit took some extra work. It’s easy enough to tell whether a point falls inside a circle, more difficult is determining whether a point falls inside a rectangle which might be rotated at any angle. But, by the end of the day, I was able to get it sorted out! Here is the same data set as the 2 previous:
