Mac Software Hints

The following have been revised to version Sequoia 15.2


 

Setting up a New Mac or Upgrading to Sequoia

The following is step-by-step what I did in bringing up a new M4 Mac-Mini

I procrastenated for several years, but I've finally abandoned Mojave 10.14) and with it, 32-bit support for IRAF. It's taken a while for things to become convenient again, but I'm a believer--- come on in, the water's fine! Here's what I've done to make things good for myself; of course, YMMV.

  • Do a software update if needed.
  • For IRAF-related reasons, you need to do:
     

    Installing IRAF

    As of January 7, 2024 this has gotten a whole better!


     

    Installing the Astrometry.net software

    The astrometry.net software is pretty neat! You run it, and it blindly finds the wcs for a frame, if you're lucky. So far, in 3 out of 3 frames (one from the Lowell 31-inch, one from the 4.3-meter DCT and LMI, and one from the Swope of a very croweded field in the LMC) it's worked beautifully.

    Things have gotten a lot easier to install. I found once I brought up Homebrew, I could install with only minimal head-bashing:

    1. Install brew as above.
    2. brew install astrometry-net
    3. Make sure that /opt/Homebrew/bin is in your path.
    4. brew install astrometry-net
    5. Install the indicies.
      • Download the 2MASS indicies, the TYCHO indicies and the USNO-B1.0indicies and stick them somewhere where you have a spare 65Gb of space.
      • Edit the /usr/local/Cellar/astrometry-net/etc/astrometry.cfg file to reflect where you've put the indicies, i.e., something like this:
        # In which directories should we search for indices?
        add_path /Volumes/pepe/astromindicies/2MASS-indicies
        add_path /Volumes/pepe/astromindicies/TYCHO-indicies
        add_path /Volumes/pepe/astromindicies/USNO-indicies 
        
    6. Add /usr/local/astrometry/bin to your path
    7. Try it on a test image:
      • solve-field --overwrite --scale-units arcsecperpix --scale-low 0.44 --scale-high 0.46 --ra 23.33 --dec 29.27 --radius 0.5 121028-987.fits
      • solve-field --overwrite --scale-units arcsecperpix --scale-low 0.43 --scale-high 0.44 --ra 84.0 --dec -69.2 --radius 0.5 n2044test.fits
      • solve-field --overwrite --scale-units arcsecperpix --scale-low 0.23 --scale-high 0.25 --ra 179.8 --dec 12.3 --radius 0.1 lmi.0079.fits
      • solve-field --overwrite --scale-units arcsecperpix --scale-low 0.43 --scale-high 0.44 --ra 92.08 --dec -71.96 --radius 0.3 --tweak-order 1 --no-plots --use-sextractor -N LMC000iCIIt1.fits LMC000iCII.fits
      • Can add:
        • --use-sextractor (newer versions: --use-source-extrator)
        • --no-tweak or --tweak-order 1
        • --no-remove-lines (very useful when it won't solve). Should probably be the default.

     

    Source Extractor

    1. brew install sextrator


     

    CMFGEN

    CMFGEN is John Hillier's wonderful radiative transfer code for hot stars with stellar winds. The care and feeding of the code is beyond the scope of the current notes. Hese are some hints that should help in getting in getting the code up and running.

    In the olden days, it was best to use the PGF95 compiler on a Mac. However, NVIDA bought out the Portland Group and they no longer support Macs, and the latest (final) version of PGF95 nominally won't work on any O/S later than Mojave. So, I have revised the instructions here for getting it going on my new M2 (Apple Silicon) Macbook Air. I've retained the PGF95 instructions below as I'm still maintaining a machine or two with these.

    Ventura and Apple M2 (works on Intel as well)

    Compiling pgplot

    Back to compiling cmfgen

  • There is only one file we have to change before we compile:
  • Well, that should do it. Do a make clean follwed by a make all. Don't worry about minor warning messages.

    A few more things to do:


     

    Miscellanous


     

    FIRE

    Rob Simcoe (MIT) provides some excellent reduction software for his amazing Magellan instrument FIRE. I did find some of the installation and usage instructions a bit confusing. The following instructions were constructed with some help from Jane Rigby.


     

    Running Larry's astrometry code

    The Buie/Wasserman IDL package produces excellent results on LMI images, but the naming conventions are idiocentric.
     

    GMOS Software

    Designing a slitlet mask