Having trouble viewing this email? Click here.
SOFIA community banner
December 2018
In this issue:

  • SOFIA at the AAS in Seattle
  • New Series of FORCAST Cookbook Recipes
  • Upcoming Tele-Talks
SOFIA at the AAS in Seattle
SOFIA in New Zealand
Observatory Tour

Monday, Jan. 7, 2019 – Wednesday, January 9, 2019

SOFIA is coming to Seattle and will be hosting free tours of the aircraft at Boeing Field for registered AAS convention attendees and their guests! Shuttles will be available to and from the convention center. Stop by the SOFIA booth in the Exhibit Hall to sign up for your preferred tour time. Tickets are limited and on a first-come first serve basis. You will need to bring your AAS badge and a government-issued photo ID (passport for foreign nationals) to sign up for the tour at the booth and to access the tour. More information is available on the official event webpage .
Instrument Scientists at the SOFIA Booth

Questions about specific instruments, their science capabilities, and recent results? Instrument-specific specialists will be at the booth at the times specified below for you to drop by with questions. Not sure which instruments could potentially fit your observations? Take a look at the SOFIA Tech Flyer or Quick Guide to get an overview of the instrument capabilities.

Click on image below for a pdf version.
FORCAST observation of NGC 7023
Data Workshop

Sunday, January 6, 2019
FORCAST 8:30 am-12:00 pm
HAWC+ 1:00–5:15 pm
Washington State Convention Center, Room 201

This free data workshop will provide an introduction to advanced analysis techniques utilizing Python to parse and visualize grism spectra with the Faint Object infraRed CAmera for the SOFIA Telescope (FORCAST) and imaging polarimetry data with the High-resolution Airborne Wideband Camera-plus (HAWC+). Workshop participants will have the first opportunity to register for the observatory tour! Register here.

View the AAS flyer on the official event webpage here .
New Series of FORCAST Cookbook Recipes

This series of recipes cover topics relevant to FORCAST Grism Spectra, each building on the knowledge obtained in the preceding recipe. The first recipe, Basic Inspection and Assessment, is a Python tutorial on plotting and analyzing data. The second recipe, Custom Spectral Extraction, is a tutorial utilizing Level 2 two-dimensional images produced by the FORCAST pipeline. A recipe covering examples of basic line analysis has recently been released.

Current Cookbook Recipes:

  • FORCAST Grism Spectra: Basic Inspection and Assessment
  • FORCAST Grism Spectra: Custom Spectral Extraction
  • FORCAST Grism: Basic Line Analysis
  • FIFI-LS Basic Cube Analysis using SOSPEX
  • FORCAST Photometry
  • How to View GREAT Spectra Using CLASS Utility
  • HAWC+ Data Recipe with 30 Doradus Publicly Available SDDT Data

The cookbook recipes contain descriptions and guided examples of common data analysis objectives using SOFIA processed data. They are written for a graduate student audience and are intended to be used with the Data Handbooks.

Upcoming Tele-Talks

SOFIA Tele-Talks are scientific presentations given via phone, with slides distributed ahead of time. The talks are targeted broadly towards members of the astronomy community who are interested in SOFIA science and in the current and potential scientific capabilities of the observatory. The talks are organized by Dan Lester (Univ. of Texas, Austin) and held approximately twice a month on Wednesdays at 9:00am Pacific, noon Eastern. 

For information on how to participate in the Tele-Talks, please check the SOFIA Tele-Talk page.

The next Tele-Talks are:

  • January 23, 2019: Mikako Matsuura (Cardiff University)
  • January 30, 2019: Jan Simpson (SETI Institute)
  • February 6, 2019: Andrew Barr (University of Leiden)
  • February 13, 2019: Gordon Stacey (Cornell University)
Executive Editor: Joan Schmelz
Content: Raquel Destefano
Design: Leslie Proudfit

Please feel free to direct questions and comments to the SOFIA Science Center help desk: sofia_help@sofia.usra.edu.