Aids data analysis for VST/OmegaCAM surveys.

SurveyTools is a Python library to aid the data processing and analysis of wide-area surveys carried out using ESO's VST/OmegaCAM instrument. The library is focused entirely on the VPHAS+ survey of the Galactic Plane, but may contain useful tools for other VST users as well.

If you have a working installation of Python on your system, you can install SurveyTools using pip:

pip install git+https://github.com/barentsen/surveytools

Alternatively, you can clone the repository and install from source:

$ git clone https://github.com/barentsen/surveytools.git
$ cd surveytools
$ python setup.py install

Note that SurveyTools has only been tested in Linux at present.

The above command is sufficient for most features. For the catalogue-generating module, however, IRAF needs to be installed and the environment variables iraf and IRAFARCH need to be set. On 64-bit Linux, the following sequence of commands installs and prepares IRAF v216 for use with surveytools:

mkdir ~/bin/iraf
cd ~/bin/iraf
wget ftp://iraf.noao.edu/iraf/v216/PCIX/iraf.lnux.x86_64.tar.gz
tar -xf iraf.lnux.x86_64.tar.gz
export iraf='~/bin/iraf'
export IRAFARCH='linux64'

To prevent IRAF from making a "caching" directory in whatever directory you run it from, it is recommended that you initialize an iraf directory in your home dir: (optional)

mkdir ~/iraf
cd ~/iraf
~/bin/iraf/unix/hlib/mkiraf.sh

astropy 1.0
photutils 0.1

Creating a pretty pawprint plot which combines the data from all of OmegaCAM's 32 CCDs into a single quicklook JPG:

vst-pawplot -o plot.jpg omegacam-exposure.fits

Creating a beautiful colour jpg from CCD #10 in VPHAS offset '1835a':

vphas-quicklook 1835a --ccd 10

Creating a multi-band catalogue of PSF photometry for VPHAS offset "0149a":

from surveytools impot VphasOffsetCatalogue
catalogue = VphasOffsetCatalogue('0149a').create_catalogue()
catalogue.write('mycatalogue.fits')

To report bugs and request features, please use the issue tracker.

Copyright 2015 Geert Barentsen.

SurveyTools is free software made available under the MIT License. For details see the LICENSE file.