I'm Dr. Fraser, Dr. O, or just Oliver.

I teach the new "group-start" Online Astro 101 course at the UW. I also help administrate the UW in the High School Astro 101 program. Before becoming a UW Lecturer I spent a few years teaching at a tiny little independent high school in the Seattle area (because high school teaching is awesome too!).

Astronomy

As a graduate student in the Astronomy Department at the University of Washington I worked with Suzanne Hawley and Kem Cook to study long period variables found in the MACHO Project. I finished in 2008; my project was Properties of Long-Period Variables from the MACHO Project (10 Mbyte pdf). Chapters 2 and 3 have both been published in the Astronomical Journal.

Code

I wrote some python code for working in the typical way astronomers work (like in IDL). I found them totally useful, so please feel free to give these libraries a try!

Utilities for reading and writing files. Reads files into numpy arrays (both float arrays and string arrays) and writes probably any type of data into files.

• ReadColumns(FileName, ncols=None, delimiter='', comment_character='#', verbose=True)
• WriteColumns(FileName, cols, header='', clobber=False, NaNstring=None, verbose=True)

I wanted something like readcol in IDL, except I thought it would be better if you didn't have to specify a format statement. So, nevermind that I say it "probably" does this, these functions actually work really well for everything I've used them for. Like readcol, these are convenience functions, made so you don't deal with file-handles.

• contour_plus(): Contours where data density is above the lowest contour, spots where it's below that level.
• myscatter(): A quick color-coded scatterplot with the settings I like.
• aggregate() and aggplot(): Some sort of combination of contour_plus() and myscatter(). Small colored spots switch to large colored blocks when the data density in x & y is too high. Aggregate() is slow like cheese.

Many thanks to, I believe, Anil Seth for writing the original Contour Plus (for IDL).

A function to return the results of a MySQL query into numpy arrays (one for each column).

• SQLQuery(query, host='', database='', user='', passwd='', db=None):