radiopadre 1.0rc5

A data visualization framework for jupyter notebooks

radiopadre: Python (Radio) Astronomy Data & Results Examiner

Radiopadre is a Jupyter notebook framework for quick and easy visualization of [radio astronomy, primarily] data products and pipelines.

Radiopadre includes integration with JS9 and CARTA for live FITS viewing of [remote] FITS files straight from your browser. (In boldface, because this is a pretty neat capability to have!)

Radiopadre is a custom Jupyter kernel, so in principle you could install it and create radiopadre notebooks directly from a Jupyter session. Some of the tight integration with JS9 and CARTA, however, works smoother if you start your sessions via the run-radiopadre client script, which takes care of starting up and stopping appropriate helper processes and such.

The general use case for Radiopadre is “here I am sitting with a slow ssh connection into a remote cluster node, my pipeline has produced 500 plots/logs/FITS images, how do I make sense of this mess?” More specifically, there are three (somewhat overlapping) scenarios that Radiopadre is designed for:

• Just browsing: interactively exploring the aforementioned 500 files using a notebook.

• Automated reporting: customized Radiopadre notebooks that automatically generate a report composed of a pipeline’s outputs and intermediate products. Since your pipeline’s output is (hopefully!) structured, i.e. in terms of filename conventions etc., you can write a notebook to exploit that structure and make a corresponding report automatically.

• Sharing notebooks: fiddle with a notebook until everything is visualized just right, insert explanatory text in mardkdown cells in between, voila, you have an instant report you can share with colleagues.

Usage, in a nutshell

See radiopadre-client package.

Tutorial

For a quick tutorial on radiopadre, download the tutorial_package, untar, and run radiopadre inside the resulting directory, locally or remotely (you can also refer to the PDF enclosed in the tarball for a poor man’s rendering of the notebook).