Observing Dark Worlds My contribution to the competetive data science website Kaggle (full description of the competition). I finished in the top 10% (out of more than 350 competitors), soundly beating Lenstool, the standard code used in the field, in both accuracy and execution time. You can download the Python code I wrote here (you'll need the data files from Kaggle for the code to do anything). Monte Carlo Toy Model Animations of a (very) simple model star with a disk. The animation is of the star as viewed from different angles (so it looks like it's spinning). The program that generated the animation uses a Monte Carlo technique with 10 million "photons". The side-by-side images compare two different sampling techniques (obviously one looks much better than the other). "Star", "disk", and "all" refer to star photons only, disk photons only, and the combined image, respectively. |
University of Pittsburgh | Department of Physics and Astronomy