Development Environment

Documentation of our development environment choices and procedures

Anaconda

The 2022.10 release (or higher) of the Anaconda Distribution is the starting point for our development environment. Key tools, services, and apps supporting our work in the Anaconda Distribution of Python are git, GitHub, and TextMate 2.0. All team members are running macOS on MacBooks of various vintages, but we expect our analysis pipeline to be completely portable to any other platform supported by Anaconda.

We begin by making a new environment from the base environment:

conda create --name transient --clone base

followed by

conda activate transient

It is a good idea to put that in your .zshrc file so that you don’t accidentally try to launch jupyter in the base environment.

Launching Jupyter

First we need to get Jupyter started. In a Terminal window:

cd ~/Projects/transient-astronomy/analyses

jupyter notebook

ccdproc

Out data processing pipeline will use ccdproc for image calibration (lights, darks, flats, and biases).

conda install -c conda-forge ccdproc

This installed ccdproc-2.3.1 and various other dependencies.

In a Jupyter notebook, we will follow the Getting Started documentation for ccdproc.

astroalign and twirl

We will use astroalign for alignment and twirl for plate-solving.

conda install -c conda-forge astroalign

Twirl in turn needs astroquery.gaia. Neither twirl nor astroquery are available through the repo.anaconda.com channels, so we use:

pip install twirl

pip install astroquery

astropy.visualization

We will use astropy.visualization and/or custom stretching routines to examine images at various stages of the data-processing pipeline.

photutils

We plan to use photutils for PSF photometry.

conda install -c conda-forge photutils