pyradiosky

Python objects and interfaces for representing diffuse, extended and compact astrophysical radio sources.

The primary user class is SkyModel, which supports:

• catalogs of point sources (read/write to hd5 and text files, read VOTables)
• diffuse models as HEALPix maps (read/write to hd5 files)
• conversion between any astropy supported coordinates (e.g. J2000 RA/Dec) and Azimuth/Elevation including calculating full polarization coherencies in Az/El.

File formats

pyradiosky supports reading in catalogs from several formats, including VO Table files, text files, FHD catalog files and SkyH5 files and supports writing to SkyH5 and text files. SkyH5 is an HDF5-based file format defined by the pyradiosky team, a full description is in the SkyH5 memo.

Community Guidelines

Contributions to this package to add new file formats or address any of the issues in the issue log are very welcome, as are bug reports and feature requests. Please see our guide on contributing

Versioning

We use a generation.major.minor version number format. We use the generation number for very significant improvements or major rewrites, the major number to indicate substantial package changes and the minor number to release smaller incremental updates (which do not include breaking API changes). We do our best to provide a significant period (usually 2 major generations) of deprecation warnings for all breaking changes to the API. We track all changes in our changelog.

Documentation

Developer API documentation is hosted here.

Citation

Please cite pyradiosky by citing our JOSS paper:

Hazelton et al., (2024). pyradiosky: A Python package for Radio Sky Models. Journal of Open Source Software, 9(97), 6503, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.06503

ADS Link

Installation

Simple installation via pip is available for users, developers should follow the directions under Developer Installation below.

For simple installation, the latest stable version is available via pip with pip install pyradiosky.

There are some optional dependencies that are required for specific functionality, which will not be installed automatically by pip. See Dependencies for details on installing optional dependencies.

Dependencies

If you are using conda to manage your environment, you may wish to install the following packages before installing pyradiosky:

Required:

• astropy>=6.0
• h5py>=3.7
• numpy>=1.23
• scipy>=1.9
• python>=3.11
• pyuvdata>=3.2.3
• setuptools_scm>=8.1

Optional:

• astropy-healpix>=1.0.2 (for working with catalogs in HEALPix formats)
• astroquery>=0.4.4 (for downloading GLEAM and other VizieR catalogs)
• lunarsky>=1.0 (for supporting telescope locations on the moon)

We suggest using conda to install all the dependencies. To install pyuvdata, astropy-healpix and astroquery, you'll need to add conda-forge as a channel (conda config --add channels conda-forge).

If you do not want to use conda, the packages are also available on PyPI. You can install the optional dependencies via pip by specifying an option when you install pyradiosky, as in pip install .[healpix] which will install all the required packages for using the HEALPix functionality in pyradiosky. The options that can be passed in this way are: [healpix, astroquery, lunarsky, all, doc, test, dev]. The first three (healpix, astroquery, lunarsky) enable various specific functionality while all will install all optional dependencies. The last three (doc, test and dev) may be useful for developers of pyradiosky.

Developer Installation

Clone the repository using git clone https://github.com/RadioAstronomySoftwareGroup/pyradiosky.git

Navigate into the pyradiosky directory and run pip install . (note that python setup.py install does not work). Note that this will attempt to automatically install any missing dependencies. If you use anaconda or another package manager you might prefer to first install the dependencies as described in Dependencies.

To install without dependencies, run pip install --no-deps

If you want to do development on pyradiosky, in addition to the other dependencies you will need the following packages:

• pytest
• pytest-cov
• coverage
• pre-commit
• sphinx
• pypandoc

One way to ensure you have all the needed packages is to use the included environment.yaml file to create a new environment that will contain all the optional dependencies along with dependencies required for testing and development (conda env create -f environment.yml). Alternatively, you can specify dev when installing pyradiosky (as in pip install pyradiosky[dev]) to install the packages needed for testing and documentation development.

To use pre-commit to prevent committing code that does not follow our style, you'll need to run pre-commit install in the top level pyradiosky directory.

Tests

Uses the pytest package to execute test suite. From the pyradiosky directory run pytest or python -m pytest.

Maintainers

pyradiosky is maintained by the RASG Managers, which currently include:

• Adam Beardsley (Arizona State University)
• Bryna Hazelton (University of Washington)
• Daniel Jacobs (Arizona State University)
• Paul La Plante (University of California, Berkeley)
• Jonathan Pober (Brown University)

Please use the channels discussed in the guide on contributing for code-related discussions. You can contact us privately if needed at rasgmanagers@gmail.com.

Acknowledgments

Support for pyradiosky was provided by NSF awards #1835421 and #1835120.