'trm.ultracam' is a Python module to provide access to raw and ucm ULTRACAM / ULTRASPEC data files, allow writing to FITS and the like. It is supposed to allow quick development of scripts, such as may be needed to correct data problems. Currently it is in "beta testing" and you should not develop anything too sophisticated based upon it as I may alter interfaces. This will be the case until version 1. However, it is quite far along and has some useful stuff, hence this release.

trm.ultracam is "pure python" and tries to be self-contained but does require several third-party packages which you may well not have. Try 'pydoc XXX' for each package XXX to see if you have it. Several of these are not absolutely essential for all features of the package, so to allow relatively simple installation I trap errors during their import.

In increasing likelihood that you don't have them they are:

numpy : (essential)

numerical Python. If you don't have this already, you probably should not be here! Most linux distributions have it in their standard pset of packages, but you may need to explicitly get it installed.

matplotlib : (needed for some plots)

fairly widespread plotting package for Python.

astropy.io.fits : (needed for FITS I/O)

Python FITS module available from STScI; I expect to replace this in future with astropy.io.fits

ppgplot : (needed for some plots)

(my version.) Get via:

git clone https://github.com/trmrsh/ppgplot.git

This is needed because it is much faster than matplotlib.

A couple of others are used by very specific scripts and are not used in the main API:

pyds9 :

ds9 interface package, used by u2ds9.py, potentially quite a useful script, so you might want this.

gdata :

google docs Python API. Needed to allow the run checking script rchecker.py communicate with the google spreadsheet. You won't need this unless you use this script, and if you don't know what I am talking about, don't bother.

If you simply want to read in data and then handle in your own way, only numpy is essential.

Once you have these then its the usual:

python setup.py install

if you are root, or:

python setup.py install --prefix=<install dir>

if you are not.

If you are primarily interested in the run checker script then try typing 'rchecker.py -h' and then 'rchecker.py -hh' to start with (may need to move out of the directory of this README file).

Tom Marsh