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mwa_source_finder

Code to find sources in MWA VCS observations.

Installation

This package uses mwa_hyperbeam, which requires the MWA FEE HDF5 file. This file can be obtained as follows:

wget http://ws.mwatelescope.org/static/mwa_full_embedded_element_pattern.h5

Then define the environment variable MWA_BEAM_FILE as the location of the HDF5 file:

export MWA_BEAM_FILE=/path/to/mwa_full_embedded_element_pattern.h5

mwa-source-finder can be installed into your working environment using pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/cplee1/mwa_source_finder.git

For most usage, the included command line interface (CLI) should be sufficient. However, the package can be imported into Python as mwa_source_finder. The CLI implementation is a good place to start to see how the package is used.

CLI Usage

Once installed, the CLI can be accessed with source-finder. Refer to the help menu (-h) for details on its usage and the option defaults.

The basic usage is as follows. The options in square brackets are the plot types available. To search for all pulsars in an observation, run

source-finder -o <obs ID> [--time_plot] [--beam_plot]

To search for all observations with a given source in it, run

source-finder -s <source> --obs_for_source [--time_plot] [--beam_plot]

where the -s option accepts either pulsar names or RA_DEC coordinates. The -o and -s options can also be used together to search for one or more sources within one or more observations.

Tips

By default, using --obs_for_source without any specified obs IDs will search for the source(s) in all obs IDs in the archive (including deleted observations). The --filter_available option can be used to check whether each observation has data available in the archive. This additional step will increase the execution time as it requires additional metadata checks.

Querying the metadata server for a large number of obs IDs can take a long time, especially when searching the whole archive. Because of this, mwa-source-finder will automatically cache obs ID metadata in a file called sf_obsid_cache.yaml in the directory where the CLI is run. The metadata will be automatically read from the cache the next time that the obs ID is searched. To disable reading/writing to the cache file, use the --no_cache option.