LDTObserverTools

The LDTObserverTools package is a collection of command-line and GUI tools for observers at the Lowell Discovery Telescope (LDT) in Happy Jack, AZ.

Some of these tools are Python ports of existing tools written in other languages, and others are newly written to meet particular needs of the observing community. Detailed instructions on how to use each tool are contained in the online documentation. Please use the GitHub Issues and/or Pull Requests features to report bugs or suggest new tools and features.

Important

If you try to run tools from this package and receive a PySimpleGUI notice requesting you to register a license key, please update THIS PACKAGE to version >= 0.6.3. PySimpleGUI moved to a subscription model on 1 July 2024, but this package (temporarily) points to an archived FOSS version of the GUI library until the various user interfaces can be ported to a different infrastructure.

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List of Programs

Tools Contained in this Package:

• DeVeny Spectrograph grating angle calculator (deveny_grangle)
• DeVeny Spectrograph collimator focus sequence estimator (deveny_collfocus)
• DeVeny Spectrograph collimator focus calculator (dfocus)
• DeVeny Spectrograph pickup noise scrubber (scrub_deveny_pickup -- beta testing)
• Simple FITS header fixing tool (fix_ldt_header)

Future Tools (planned or in development):

• LMI exposure time calculator (lmi_etc)
• NEO Confirmation Page ephemeris generator (neocp_ephem)
• Input List Validator (validate_input_list)
• Observer Target List Tool (observer_target_list)

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Installing

Set up a clean python environment

Because installing a python tool like LDTObserverTools also installs or upgrades its :ref:`Package Dependencies <dependencies>`, the best course of action is to setup a clean python environment into which the installation will occur. This mitigates any possible dependency conflicts with other packages you use.

The recommended method of setting up a new environment is with conda:

conda create -n obstools python=3.11
conda activate obstools

See Managing Environments with Conda for more details.

Installing LDTObserverTools via pip

Note

The commands here assume pip is associated with Python3. To check, run pip --version from the command line and check that the associated python version is >= 3.10.

Also, you will need git installed on your system / in your environment.

To install the latest version of LDTObserverTools and its required dependencies, execute:

pip install "obstools @ git+https://github.com/LowellObservatory/LDTObserverTools"

This will download the latest version of the package from GitHub and install it along with its required dependencies. (Note: whether or not you need quotation marks depends on your particular shell -- bash, zsh, etc.)

As the package undergoes continued development, it will be necessary to upgrade your installation to access the latest features. The upgrade process should simply be a matter of executing:

pip install "obstools @ git+https://github.com/LowellObservatory/LDTObserverTools" --upgrade

Optional Dependencies

Some of the instrument-specific routines in this package require additional dependencies that are not otherwise needed by the majority of the routines herein.

• If you are using the scrub_deveny_pickup tool, you will need the spectroscopic data reduction pipeline PypeIt for the iterative cleaning of the pickup noise. It can be installed by including it in the optional dependencies, e.g.:

  pip install "obstools[pypeit] @ git+https://github.com/LowellObservatory/LDTObserverTools"