Welcome to the landing page for the Interactive Spectral Interpretation System (ISIS) pre-workshop event to the Chandra 2015 meeting, The Universe in High-Resolution X-ray Spectra.

Tuesday, August 18 at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics (CfA)

Please communicate your interest to the Chandra workshop organizers by emailing cxchelp@head.cfa.harvard.edu
or sign up on the meeting registration page.

There is no additional charge to attend the workshop

Conference organizers
SOC: Victoria Grinberg (grinberg@space.mit.edu) and Lia Corrales (lia@space.mit.edu)>
LOC: Javier Garcia

Program

The workshop will take place at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics on Tuesday, August 18

9:30 - 11 am: Downstairs conference room in CfA library

There will be three 20 minute talks to introduce users to the basic capabilities and features provided by ISIS.
Talks pdfs are located on tutorials page.

Introduction to basic capabilities and commands, including loading and fitting of Chandra HETG data
Analysis of spectral lines with AtomDB and XSTARDB
Basic plotting tools in ISIS, an intro to xfig, and other scripts for making clean plots

11 - 12 noon: break

Participants can move to room B106 to get CIAO and/or ISIS questions answered, or take a break

12 - 6 pm: B105

Free-work session.
Participants can bring their own data or work on pre-assigned topics with archival data. Tutorial scripts covering each introductory topic will be provided, but the workshop organizers will cater to subjects of interest to participants, including more advanced spectral analysis techniques.

Possible afternoon topics

advanced plotting with xfig
advanced AtomDB and XSTAR libraries
working with multiple datasets and combining data; using data from multiple instruments
using ISIS for multiwavelength data analysis
building your own models in ISIS
X-ray timing analysis in ISIS

Participants are welcome to reach out to the organizers with suggestions for further topics.

ISIS installation guides

Participants should install ISIS on their machines prior to the workshop.

A detailed installation guide under Linux: http://space.mit.edu/asc/isis/install.html
A guide for Max OS X 10.9 (Mavericks) is available here (updated to include png!)
A quick guide to ISIS installation under Mac OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) is on the Remeis wiki

Please also install the Remeis ISIS scripts, which are extremely useful and will be used in some tutorials.

For users interested in plotting with xfig, the necessary install files are here: http://www.jedsoft.org/fun/slxfig/download.html

ISIS capabilities

Conduct standard X-ray spectral analysis: load X-ray spectrum data files (e.g. pha, arf, and rmf), apply XSPEC and/or custom spectral models, and display the results
Navigate AtomDB 2.0 and 3.0 database for collisionally ionized plasma models
Navigate XSTAR atomic databases for photoionized plasmas (XSTARDB)
Analyze spectra and lightcurves (Fourier timing analysis, pulse arrival time analysis, and more) in the same framework to obtain results such as Grinberg et al. (2014)
Create complex und fully customizable plots using the slxfig library: Xfig examples and Remeis Xfig gallery
Analyze multiwavelength SEDs
Calculate fluxes and equivalents width of lines
Simultaneously fit multiple datasets with complex parameter dependencies
Parallel computing with MPI and SLmpi

ISISInteractive Spectral Interpretation System (ISIS) pre-workshop event for The Universe in High-Resolution X-ray Spectra