Clark Acohido was born and raised in Nu’uanu, O’ahu. He received a bachelor’s degree in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i at Manoa and is currently working part time as a post-baccalaureate researcher for the Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology. In 2023, his research project, Crater Size Frequency Distribution for Skylight in Mare Tranquillitatis, was presented in the poster gallery at the American Geophysical Union conference in San Francisco, California. Clark’s goals are to pursue a master’s degree in planetary sciences and continue working as a researcher. Some of his hobbies include playing table top and video games, cooking, and making music.
Home Island: O’ahu
High School: Kamehameha Schools Kaplama
Institution when accepted: Hawai’i Institute of Geophysics and Planetology
Project title: Improving the Cooling Switch System for the Prime Focus Spectrograph
Project Site: Gemini Observatory, Hilo, HI
Mentor: Pablo Martin Ravelo & Clara Martinez Vazquez
Project Abstract:
IRAF is an image processing and data analysis software that was written by the National Optical Astronomy Observatories (NOAO) in 1984. Institutional development and maintenance for IRAF was discontinued in 2013, however, support was continued by volunteers. Despite being discontinued, IRAF is still widely used in observatories and universities. Gemini has its own data reduction package under IRAF. In January 2024, a new version of IRAF was released by NOIRLab which ported the Gemini package and its dependencies from 32-bit to 64-bit, however support for this version is also limited. To address this limited support, scripts were written to replicate common IRAF functions using only Python supported libraries (such as Astropy or SciPy). The first step in replicating IRAF tasks in Python was to scan through Gemini repositories to determine which scripts have IRAF dependencies. This scan found 87 unique tasks which were then sorted by frequency of use. The first task that was migrated over was imstatistics because it is commonly used and there are several scripts where imstatistics is its only IRAF dependency. Several other native IRAF tasks, such as fparse and imdisplay, were partially migrated since these tasks are used to interpret input for the imstatistics script and ensure that the imstatistics script is affecting the same image region as the original IRAF imstatistics task. An open source version of these scripts will be released on GitHub so community members can perform long-term maintenance even after support for IRAF ceases.