EVLA information

It has been really hard to find EVLA information like beam size, largest angular scale, sensitivity, etc. on the VLA pages because all of the google searches point to old VLA information. The most useful and recent EVLA information on beam size and largest angular scale is here

usetex failure in latex documents

When I use matplotlib's internal tex (rcParams['text.useTex']=False), the postscript files generated cause errors that look like this when you try to ps2pdf them:


ps2pdf h2co_pilot.ps
Error: /rangecheck in --get--
Operand stack:
--dict:20/25(ro)(L)-- --nostringval-- 71
Execution stack:
%interp_exit .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- false 1 %stopped_push 1862 1 3 %oparray_pop 1861 1 3 %oparray_pop 1845 1 3 %oparray_pop 1739 1 3 %oparray_pop --nostringval-- %errorexec_pop .runexec2 --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 2 %stopped_push --nostringval-- %finish_show --nostringval-- --nostringval-- 9 6 0 --nostringval-- (pdf_text_enum_t) %op_show_continue --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
--dict:1147/1684(ro)(G)-- --dict:0/20(G)-- --dict:70/200(L)-- --dict:116/300(L)-- --dict:44/200(L)-- --dict:25/42(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
Current file position is 791626
GPL Ghostscript 8.64: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
make: *** [h2co_pilot.pdf] Error 1


They will not open in MacOS's Preview.app either.

Solution: Make figures with rcParams['text.useTex'] = True

RATRAN on Mac OS X

Mac OS X doesn't like the defaults built in to RATRAN. It died unhappily with errors like:

ld_classic: can't locate file for: -lcrt0.o
and
ld: warning: in /usr/local/lib//libcfitsio.a, file is not of required architecture


In order to get it to run, I had to do the following:

1. Install CFITSIO with CFLAGS="-arch x86_64 -arch i386 -g -O2" to /usr/local/lib
   
2. Edit the sky/Makefile OPT variable (line 23) to read:
   OPT = -I. -O2 -fno-automatic -arch x86_64
   

Also, you need to set up system variables:

export RATRAN=/path/to/Ratran 
export RATRANRUN=/path/to/Ratran/run