Expanding Our Toolkit
It’s Time for Another Update Times have have been incredibly productive and exciting. If you read my last update, you’ll know we successfully wrapped up the implementation of the Core Spectral Types. With that strong foundation in place, the real fun has begun. The Next Frontier: Advanced Methods Now that we have the core types for handling our spectral data, we've started diving into the algorithms that make Stingray so powerful for X-ray astronomers. Conquering the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram Implementing the Lomb-Scargle periodogram. For those who might not be familiar, astronomical data is notoriously messy. We rarely get perfectly, evenly-spaced observations (telescopes have down-time, Earth gets in the way, etc.). Standard Fourier transforms struggle with this unevenly sampled data. Then Enters Lomb-Scargle method! It's a lifesaver for finding periodic signals (like a pulsar spinning or a star orbiting its companion) in this kind of patchy data. Bringing this functionality ...