Making Tables

A quick update on the first paper. We’re getting closer to having the final clustering procedure nailed down. Once we’ve got that, we can make the final catalog of markings from Season 2 and Season 3 from the millions of classifications we have gathered over the past few years. While Michael has been working on that, I’ve been working on some of the other tables we need to include for the paper. We know what we’ve done and have good knowledge of the HiRISE data, but we need to make sure it’s clear in the paper so that any researcher or reader has all the information needed to use the catalog of fans and blotches we’re generating thanks to your clicks. To do that we’re going to put in a table that summarizes all the relevant info about the HiIRSE observations from Seasons 2 and Season 3.

The easiest way I found to do this is to grab this information from the headers of the reduced single HiRISE images non-map projected images with the spacecraft pointing information that we created from the raw HiRISE observations. The HiRISE team reduction pipeline produces the three color band mosaics that we dice up and show on http://www.planetfour.org but since they don’t include the spacecraft information we had to  build a single filter version ourselves where we added a few steps to the process that would allow the information needed to get the location on the South pole and the spacecraft information into the image headers. This is what Chuhong worked on last summer.

So I took a script written by Gauri adapted from Chuhong’s code to get the other relevant info like imaging scale, north azimuth, solar longitude from the single filter image headers and stick it in a mysql  (a database interface language/setup) table.Then I spent a bit of time writing a code to read the table I created and output it in the format needed for the paper. We’re writing the paper in a format known as LaTeX. I spent an afternoon getting the format correct so that table file would compile. You can glimpse part of the results (the first few lines of the multi-page table) below. I still need to reduce the number of decimal places outputted in certain columns, but the basic information is there. We’ll be including a version of this table in the paper text or supplementary material.