Welcome to the SRT Single Dish Tools documentation!

Introduction

The Sardinia Radio Telescope Single Dish Tools (SDT) are a set of Python (>=3.6) tools designed for the quicklook and analysis of single-dish radio data, starting from the backends present at the Sardinia Radio Telescope. They are composed of a Python 3.4+ library for developers and a set of command-line scripts to soften the learning curve for new users.

The Python library is written following the modern coding standards documented in the Astropy Coding Guidelines. Automatic tests cover a significant fraction of the code, and are launched each time a commit is pushed to the Github repository, through Github Actions. The current version is 0.7-devXXX, indicating the development version towards 0.7. See below the tentative roadmap.

In the current implementation, spectroscopic and total-power on-the-fly scans are supported, both as part of standalone flux measurements through “cross scans” and as parts of a map. Maps are formed through a series of scans that swipe the source region.

otf vs xscan

Figure 1. On-the-fly maps vs cross scan strategies for single dish observations. The first is able to produce images, the second is used to obtain quick flux measurements of point-like sources.

Tentative Roadmap

  • v.0.1: Simple map creation, draft calibrated fluxes

  • v.0.2: Stable calibrated fluxes, use of multibeam in the K band

  • v.0.3: Stabilization of interactive interface

  • v.0.4: Generalized, user-supplied scanset filters

  • v.0.5: Converters to MBFITS and CLASS

  • v.0.6: Sun Images

  • v.0.7: Full support of general coordinate systems, including Galactic

  • v.0.8: Improved calibration, accept input gain curves

  • v.1.0: Code release.

Installation

Prerequisites

Other Python distributions

Install the dependencies with pip (including a few optional but recommended):

$ pip install astropy>=3.6 scipy numpy matplotlib pyyaml h5py statsmodels numba pyregion

Cloning and installation

Clone the repository:

(py3) $ cd /my/software/directory/
(py3) $ git clone https://github.com/discos/srt-single-dish-tools.git

or if you have deployed your SSH key to Github:

(py3) $ git clone git@github.com:discos/srt-single-dish-tools.git

Then:

(py3) $ cd srt-single-dish-tools
(py3) $ pip install .

That’s it. After installation has ended, you can verify that software is installed by executing:

(py3) $ SDTimage -h

If the help message appears, you’re done!

Updating

To update the code, simply run git pull and reinstall:

(py3) $ git pull
(py3) $ pip install .

Tutorials

Command line interface

API documentation

Indices and tables