Rahul gives unsolicited advice

Having reproduced the results of the original paper and extending it, for now i'm just looking to learn tricks of the trade - automating tasks like fits file extraction and scatter plots, celestial projections of the objects, learning to make animations using matplotlib and whatnot. A Mollweide projection of 500,000 galaxies observed by the SDSS. A Mollweide Projection of ~300,000 quasars observed by the SDSS NOTE : You guys can see that the projection with quasars is a lot more uniform that the projection with galaxies - there are gaps in the filled region i.e dec range +-120:180! This maybe because galaxies can only observed till z<0.5 (maybe, i'll need to verify this). Beyond this point, galaxies aren't spatially resolved anymore and they look the same as stars. Also, beyond  this redshift, galaxies become too dim to even be observed, unlike quasars which are extremely luminous! The reason the quasar projection is more uniform (i'm speculating here) ...

Yes. The exclamation marks, all of three of them are necessary! Because i cannot tell you in words how blown away i am having used python for the last week. Don't get me wrong, i've used/tried python before, learning for a couple of days but eventually abandoning it! And the reason i love (yes, love. not just like. ever-lasting love) it so much is because of what i've been able to accomplish. Before i start with what happened this week, I'm sure there are ways to do the same using other programming languages : C, Java, Mathematica and what not but they (probably) don't have the extremely extensive documentation and gazillions of examples. So, as I said last week , my work for the summer was the reproduce the results of a certain paper by Richards, Gordon T (2000) which analyses the color-redshift relation of 2625 quasars. I've extensively explained the details of the paper and the results i am to reproduce in last week's post. And as i said, last week en...

So, here's what i'm working on. I'm reproducing a paper published in 2000 by Richards et al on the colors of 2625 quasars at red shifts ranging from 0<z<5 and the empirical relation between color and red shift of a quasar. I don't know how much of that you understand but well, that's my work for the summer. Let me now break down it down. The color of a quasar is the difference in the (AB) magnitude of a quasar in different bands - u, g, r, i, z to be specific in the case of the SDSS . The definition of color in this case is no different than what you and I use everyday to describe objects. Refer to this awesome comic by the oatmeal .   The color receptors mentioned in the comic are specifically sensitive to the R, G & B bands, which is why they are our primary colors. For humans specifically. Now, we do something similar here - take a CCD (which is our brain) and fit it with 5 (instead of just 3) filters (which are u, g, r, i, z for the SDSS). Ligh...