An Analysis of WMAP Data in Mathematica
January 19, 2019
I've been wanting to analyze WMAP data statistically for a while now. My favorite program, Mathematica, natively supports FITS files, which are apparently the standard in astronomy. So I have set about working with FITS files from the WMAP mission. It's a lot harder than I expected; the files are massive collections of data points and they are somewhat clumsy to work with. Here is my first several hours of effort on day one:
This is scaled down on a huge screen in order to show just how much data I'm trying to work with. These are only the first twenty rows of each data table, which contain tens of thousands of rows and at least 2.5 million data points. The problem is that the raw telescope data does not have an obvious association between the time domain data and the position of each data point. So it is going to be difficult for me to generate images, although that's not the primary purpose here.
This is a work in progress and the above is how far I have gotten so far.
Last updated: January 19, 2019
© Andrew G. Watters