PROFIT: A Tool for Visualizing and Modeling High-Resolution Spectra

Purpose

Profit is a GUI (graphical user interface) tool for accessing high-resolution spectra. Profit displays spectra in various formats, allowing users to identify emission lines, to convert an identified line into velocity units using a user-selected wavelength, to store (and restore) individual spectra, to fit lines to gaussians, and other features. Profit primarily handles the "exploratory" phase of analysis, although it has some powerful features. Combining the velocity function with the ability to store and plot multiple features, it is very easy to see if lines from a particular ion or isosequence are systematically red- or blue- shifted, asymmetrical, or broadened. Profit's GUI is based on ROOT, a multifunctional library developed at CERN for high energy physics analysis. ROOT was chosen because it is well-supported and designed to handle histogram data smoothly. Although ROOT features and functions are used " behind the scenes " in Profit, the user does not need to have any familiarity with ROOT to use Profit. Profit runs natively on a variety of systems, including Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, and Solaris.

Download Profit

Profit is distributed with all the required libaries in a single tar file. It will be necessary only to download the binary profit tarball. Check out the Installation instructions for more information.

Current Version: 2.0.0, Released August 7th, 2007

What Are The New Features?

Test Spectra for Profit

v2.0.0 Mac OS X (10.3.9/10.4) Linux (libc2.3) Windows XP Solaris 9 Source
v1.0.0 Mac OS X (10.3.9/10.4) Linux (libc2.3) N/A Solaris 8 Source

Manual (HTML, PDF, Postscript)

The manual contains complete instructions for installing and using Profit, including installation, reading both FITS and ASCII spectral data, and identifying and fitting emission lines.

Other Online Documentation

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions, including our current " To-Do " list

Screenshots: Some screenshots of profit in action


If you have any questions concerning Profit, please visit the Feedback form.


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Last modified: Thursday, 16-Aug-2007 10:29:49 EDT