R language utility functions with astronomical
application
The R language is a straightforward and powerful language for
manipulating, analyzing, and displaying data. It is free
software with releases for Unix, Windows, and Mac operating
systems. The language is in active open-source
development by the R Development Core Team of the R Foundation for
Statistical Computing, Vienna, Austria, as a language and
environment for statistical computing. More information
is available at http://www.R-project.org.
For the code below, comments and bug reports are always welcome; a
contact link is at the bottom of the page. The latest versions
of the packages are here; current or earlier versions are on CRAN.
Time and position functions
Functions for time (sidereal time, Julian day, modified Julian day),
position (elevation, azimuth, angular distance, B1950-J2000
precession and vice versa), and calibration (convolution of a disk
and Gaussian, flux from a uniform thermal disk).
Observational cosmology functions
Functions to compute distances, comoving volumes, lookback time, and
luminosities (mostly but not entirely geared toward molecular line
observations) in a flat cosmology.
FITS file utilities
Functions in FITSio read multi-dimensional arrays (images and image
cubes) and bintables, and write a multi-dimensional array (image or
image cube) data. The function contains sub-functions that can
read, edit, and parse headers and read image and binatbles
independently. For usage and examples see the comments at the
top of the file. Within these extension types, the only known
incompleteness is the absence of bit, complex and array descriptor
data types for bintables.
FITS is the Flexible Image Transport System, a common file format in
astronomy. Further information, including format
specifications and example files, is available at http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/
and http://www.cv.nrao.edu/fits/,
among other places.
Binning (akin to smoothing but for independent bins, not binning
for e.g. histograms)
Binning in this application is averaging adjacent elements in a
vector, for instance binning a spectrum to increase the signal to
noise ratio at the cost of spectral resolution. As an example,
for a sequence of numbers {1 5 3 8 9 2}, binning by three would
produce the two values {3, 6.33}, the means of (1+5+3)/3 = 3 and
(8+9+2)/3 = 6.33.
bin.r is a straightforward but inefficient (it
uses a for loop) binning routine that is useful for simple
vectors. For usage see the comments at the top of the file.
binmat.r generates a matrix that, with a
matrix multiplication, bins vectors or multiple vectors stored in
matrices. This is efficient for binning large numbers of
vectors. binmat2.r does the same but
leaves the size of the original matrix unchanged by repeating
elements within the bins. For usage see the comments at the
top of the file.
Miscellaneous functions
ha_freq.r generates the frequencies of
H-alpha recombination lines.
ruze.r gives the Ruze efficiency factor as a
function of rms surface error and frequency.
clipIm.r enhances image contrast by clipping
the amplitudes of an image (array).
svdinv.r performs an SVD matrix
inversion for ill-conditioned or non-square matrices.
Code on this page was
developed for analyzing instrumental data from the Zpectrometer, an ultrawideband
spectrometer for high-redshift galaxy searches with the U.S.
National Radio Astronomy Observatory's 100 meter diameter Robert C.
Byrd Green Bank Telescope. The Zpectrometer was
supported by National Science Foundation grant AST-0503946.
Questions or comments? Please contact Andrew Harris.