ayush1999 / hendrics

Shell scripts for spectral-timing analysis of X-ray astronomical data.

HENDRICS - High ENergy Data Reduction Interface from the Command Shell

Notice

This repository contains an evolution of MaLTPyNT. This software is being heavily rewritten in order to use Stingray's classes and functions whenever possible. To use the original MaLTPyNT, please go to matteobachetti/MaLTPyNT.

Description

This set of command-line scripts based on Stingray is designed to do correctly and fairly easily a quick-look (spectral-)timing analysis of X-ray data, treating properly the gaps in the data due, e.g., to occultation from the Earth or passages through the SAA. Originally, its development as MaLTPyNT - Matteo's Libraries and Tools in Python for NuSTAR Timing - was driven by the need of performing aperiodic timing analysis on NuSTAR data, whose long dead time made it difficult to treat power density spectra with the usual tools. By exploiting the presence of two independent detectors, one could use the cospectrum as a proxy for the power density spectrum (for an explanation of why this is important, look at Bachetti et al., ApJ, 800, 109 -arXiv:1409.3248).

Today, this set of command line scripts is much more complete and it is capable of working with the data of many more satellites. Among the features already implemented are power density and cross spectra, time lags, pulsar searches with the Epoch folding and the Z_n^2 statistics, color-color and color-intensity diagrams. More is in preparation: rms-energy, lag-energy, covariance-energy spectra, Lomb-Scargle periodograms and in general all that is available in Stingray. The analysis done in HENDRICS will be compatible with the graphical user interface DAVE, so that users will have the choice to analyze single datasets with an easy interactive interface, and continue the analysis in batch mode with HENDRICS. The periodograms produced by HENDRICS (like a power density spectrum or a cospectrum), can be saved in a format compatible with Xspec or Isis, for those who are familiar with those fitting packages. Despite its original main focus on NuSTAR, the software can be used to make standard aperiodic timing analysis on X-ray data from, in principle, any other satellite (for sure XMM-Newton and RXTE).

The documentation can be found here.

A tutorial is also available here

Development guidelines

The development will initially be towards substituting MaLTPyNT's internal application programming interface (API) with Stingray's, while maintaining the same Command Line Interface (CLI). Ideally, a user that only uses MaLTPyNT from the command line, without executing python explicitly, should not notice the difference. In the hendrics/tests directory, there is a test suite called test_fullrun.py. These tests use the actual command line scripts, and should always pass (albeit with some adaptations). The other test suites, e.g. test_unit.py, tests the API, and will need to be rewritten to account for the API changes.