Quickstart Guide ∞

Warning

This quickstart guide is subject to (much) change during the development of the pipeline. New features and ways of operating the pipeline are still being added. Current data taken in stare mode can be reduced to the point of sky subtraction.

Install ∞

The best way to install soxspipe is to use conda and install the package in its own isolated environment (using either Anaconda or Minicoda), as shown here:

conda create -n soxspipe python=3.9 soxspipe -c conda-forge
conda activate soxspipe

If you have previously installed soxspipe, a warning will be issued stating that a conda environment already exists; select y when asked to remove the existing environment. This has proven to be the cleanest way to upgrade soxspipe.

To check installation was successful run soxspipe -v. This should return the version number of the installation.

Demo Data ∞

The demo XShooter data (stare-mode) is of the X-ray binary SAX J1808.4-3658 taken during a 2019 outburst. You can download and unpack the data with the following commands:

curl -L "https://www.dropbox.com/s/t3adwc86bcwonkj/soxspipe-quickstart-demo-lite.tgz?dl=1" > soxspipe-quickstart-demo.tgz
tar -xzvf soxspipe-quickstart-demo.tgz

You may also retrieve the raw data directly from the ESO archive with the following parameters:

RA = 18 08 27.54
Dec = -36 58 44.3
Night = 2019 08 30
Spectroscopy = XSHOOTER/VLT
Science

Preparing the Data-Reduction Workspace ∞

Now you have a sample data set to work with, it is time to prepare the soxspipe-quickstart-demo workspace. Change into the soxspipe-quickstart-demo directory and run the soxspipe prep command:

cd soxspipe-quickstart-demo
soxspipe prep .

Once the workspace has been prepared, you should find it contains the following files and folders:

  • misc/: a lost-and-found archive of non-fits files

  • raw_frames/: all raw-frames to be reduced

  • sessions/: directory of data-reduction sessions

  • sof/: the set-of-files (sof) files required for each reduction step

  • soxspipe.db: a sqlite database needed by the data-organiser, please do not delete

soxspipe reduces data within a reduction session and an initial base session is automatically created when running the prep command.

Reduce the Data ∞

In most use case, you will want to reduce all of the raw frames contained within your workspace. To do this run the command:

soxspipe reduce all .