Spinifex
Pure Python tooling for ionospheric analyses in radio astronomy, e.g. getting total electron content and rotation measure.
Spinifex is, in part, a re-write of RMextract
(Mevius, M. 2018). We have re-implemented all existing features of RMextract, but
spinifex is not directly backwards compatible with RMextract. We plan to extend to new features very soon.
Spinifex uses following external packages for RM modeling:
- PyIRI - Python implementation of the International Reference Ionosphere
- ppigrf - Pure Python IGRF (International Geomagnetic Reference Field)
Why 'Spinifex'?
Spinifex is a spiky grass native to the Australian continent. The spines of spinifex are reminiscent of the ionospheric pierce points computed by this software. The 'spin' in spinifex can also be thought to relate to the ionospheric Faraday rotation this software predicts.
Command line interface
To run spinifex from the command line, use:
spinifex --help
Documentation
Example of RM output as function of azimuth and zenith angle
Full documentation and examples of the Python module and the command-line tools are available on Read the Docs.
Installation
Spinifex requires Python >=3.9. All dependencies can be installed with pip.
Stable release via PyPI:
pip install spinifex
If you have casacore installed, install with optional python-casacore dependency to work on MeasurementSets:
pip install spinifex[casacore]
Latest version on Gitlab:
pip install git+https://git.astron.nl/RD/spinifex
Update in version 2.0
All coordinates are now calculated assuming a spherical Earth to comply with standards in IONEX and other ionospheric models. This means that the predicted RM and TEC values will differ slightly from before version 2.0.
Citing
If you use spinifex for your publications, please cite as:
Mevius, M., Thomson, A., Dijkema, T.J.: Spinifex (2025),
License
This project is licensed under the Apache License Version 2.0
3 maintainers
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