Getting started¶

Overview¶

The problem of understanding the open data that is provided by Event Horizon Telescope team on VLBI Reconstruction Portal (http://vlbiimaging.csail.mit.edu) is complicated. All the radio interferometry data is generally stored in OIFITS file rather than a normal FITS file. There is a lot of Radio Astronomy specific data that has to be taken out and understood before working on the acquired data and analysing it. OIFITS is a standard for exchanging data for Optical (Visible/IR) Interferometry, and is based on the FITS Standard. Since mm/sub-mm VLBI shares a lot of similarities to optical interferometry, this format is better suited for mm/sub-mm measurements than UVFITS.

oifits is a Python package for reading and analysing OIFITS Data. One can easily procure the interferometry data from the oifits file and store every thing in a numpy array for further analysis. oifits also relies heavily on and interfaces well with the implementations of

fits module of Astropy package [@astropy] (astropy.io.fits).

oifits is designed to be used by both researchers working on Optical Interferometry and by researchers working on Event Horizon Telescope Data.

Installation¶

It’s as easy as running one command!¶

Stable Versions:¶

For installation of the latest stable version of EinsteinPy:

Using pip:
```
$ pip install oifits
```
Using conda:
```
$ conda install -c conda-forge oifits
```

Latest Versions¶

For installing the development version, you can do two things:

Installation from clone:

$ git clone https://github.com/shreyasbapat/python-oifits.git
$ cd python-oifits/
$ python setup.py install

Install using pip:

$ pip install git+https://github.com/einsteinpy/einsteinpy.git

Development Version¶

$ git clone your_account/python-oifits.git
$ pip install --editable /path/to/python-oifits[dev]

Please open an issue here if you feel any difficulty in installation!

Running your first code using the library¶

An example can be found in the examples folder.

Contribute¶

oifits is an open source library which is under heavy development. To contribute kindly do visit :

https://github.com/shreyasbapat/python-oifits

and also check out current posted issues and help us expand this awesome library.