What’s this?

To verify the functionality of the PPA pipeline and allow some quick reduction while at the telescope, I wrote a couple of small routines to perform basic reduction steps and allow an easier way of inspecting pODI data frames.

The routines are written in stand-alone python and are designed to not require IRAF and/or pyraf. However, you will need several common python packages.

Sounds interesting? Check out how to install them!

You can also read up on new additions and updates

There is also a first conference proceeding (presented at the ADASS XXIII conference on Hawaii in September 2013) giving a very short overview on the functionality and implementation of the pipeline. You can get the paper on astro-ph or locally from here.

The routines you can download are working, but they don’t contain a whole lot of error checking, so don’t be surprised to get some weird python errors in case you feed them some input they can’t handle. Also, if you have any feature requests or find a part that’s not doing what it should or the way it should please let me (contacts) know. Thanks!

What routines are there and what do they do?

Once you downloaded the files, your directory listing should look similar to this:

Depending on whether you downloaded the development version or the official release you might have all or just some of these files.

The files starting with podi_ contain the actual scripts that are called during the pipeline execution. Additional files are, for example, the bad pixel region files (bpm_xy**.reg).

Most importantly, you will find the two main scripts for the reduction, as these two will create all calibration frames and perform the actual reduction:

If you are interested in what these and all other scripts do, check out the full list of available scripts.