tkp.accessors – Image container classes

Introduction

The “accessors” system attempts to abstract away the physical image storage format from the library logic. The higher-level data access routines should not care whether the data is stored in a CASA table, or a FITS file, or in some other format: they should be coded against a uniform interface provided by the appropriate accessor.

An accessor should subclass tkp.accessors.dataaccessor.DataAccessor, which is an abstract base class (ie, it has abc.ABCMeta as its metaclass). Accessors must conform to the DataAccessor interface. This means they must provide the following attributes:

beam
Restoring beam. Tuple of three floats: semi-major axis (in pixels), semi-minor axis (pixels) and position angle (radians).
centre_ra
Right ascension at the central point of the image, in decimal degrees.
centre_dec
Declination at the central point of the image, in decimal degrees.
data
NumPy array providing access to the (two-dimensional) pixel data.
freq_bw
The frequency bandwidth of the image, in Hz.
freq_eff
Effective frequency of the image in Hz. That is, the mean frequency of all the visibility data which comprises this image.
pixelsize
(x, y) tuple representing the size of a pixel along each axis in units of degrees.
tau_time
Total time on sky, in seconds.
taustart_ts
Timestamp of the first integration which constitutes part of this image. MJD in seconds.
url
A (string) URL representing the location of the image at time of processing.
wcs
An instance of tkp.utility.coordinates.WCS, appropriately initialized to handle coordinate conversions for this image.

An accessor which provides all of these properties is guaranteed to be usable with all core TraP functionality.

In some cases, most notably quality control, specialized (eg, per-telescope) metadata may also be required. A further abstract base class should be constructed to define the interface required. For example, tkp.accessors.lofaraccessor.LofarAccessor defines the following metadata which must be provided for LOFAR quality control:

antenna_set
Antenna set in use during observation. String; LBA_INNER, LBA_OUTER, LBA_SPARSE, LBA or HBA
ncore
Number of core stations in use during observations constituting this image. Integer.
nremote
Number of remote stations in use during observations constituting this image. Integer.
nintl
Number of international stations in use during observations constituting this image. Integer.
subbandwidth
Width of a subband, in Hz.
subbands
Number of subbands.