Moving on, though I’ll have to look back

I set aside my work with the Crab data, since I was just getting frustrated instead of making any progress. I’ll need to go back and figure out how to deal with the deadtime correction in the light curves, but that will wait until next week.

In the mean time, my work with MCG-6-30-15 has shown that there is a definite difference in results when extracting flux-resolved spectra versus time-resolved spectra. So far, my data pipeline has only done time-resolved spectra, but we’re not sure anymore that this is the right approach.

My project the last week has been to add flux-selected spectra extraction to the pipeline. I thought it would be difficult, and I do have some more tweaking to do that might turn out to be harder than I’d like, but my initial implementation did not take as long as I thought it might.

Currently, the pipeline treats each “observation” (as defined by the RXTE data) separately. It cuts the lightcurve into 0.25 cts/second slices, and then bins those up until there are at least 100,000 net photons in a bin. This ensures that there is enough signal to get a decent fit of the spectra to various models, but hopefully minimizes spectra that cut across flux states.

I’d like to improve this by making all of the flux bins equal across the entire data set (i.e. so that the flux bins from observation to observation are taken from the same count rate ranges). I can’t currently think of any way to do this easily, but I’ll ponder it for the next week or so, and maybe something will come to mind.