External Dependencies¶
FITS access (pyfits)¶
PyFITS provides an interface to FITS formatted files under the Python scripting language and PyRAF, the Python-based interface to IRAF. It is useful both for interactive data analysis and for writing analysis scripts in Python using FITS files as either input or output. PyFITS is a development project of the Science Software Branch at the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Numerical Python (numpy)¶
NumPy is the fundamental package needed for scientific computing with Python. It contains among other things:
- a powerful N-dimensional array object
- sophisticated (broadcasting) functions
- tools for integrating C/C++ and Fortran code
- useful linear algebra, Fourier transform, and random number capabilities.
Besides its obvious scientific uses, NumPy can also be used as an efficient multi-dimensional container of generic data. Arbitrary data-types can be defined. This allows NumPy to seamlessly and speedily integrate with a wide variety of databases.
Numpy is licensed under the BSD license, enabling reuse with few restrictions.
Scientific Python (scipy)¶
SciPy is open-source software for mathematics, science, and engineering. It is also the name of a very popular conference on scientific programming with Python. The SciPy library depends on NumPy, which provides convenient and fast N-dimensional array manipulation. The SciPy library is built to work with NumPy arrays, and provides many user-friendly and efficient numerical routines such as routines for numerical integration and optimization.
The pipeline makes minimal use of scipy for smoothing and interpolation.
GBT Weather Forecasting (from Ron Maddalena)¶
AIPS (idlToSdfits + Parseltongue + Obit)¶
The Astronomical Image Processing System is a software package for calibration, data analysis, image display, plotting, and a variety of ancillary tasks on Astronomical Data. It comes from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
A local GBT utililty, idlToSdfits (written by Glen Langston) is used to convert from NRAO SDFITS format to AIPS SDFITS format.
Obit is a group of software packages for handling radio astronomy data, especially interferometric and single dish OTF imaging.
ParselTongue is a Python interface to classic AIPS, Obit and possibly other task-based data reduction packages.
In the GBT pipeline, the combination of these packages is used for gridding, imaging and (sometimes) baseline removal.
