Welcome to dran’s documentation!

Introduction

DRAN is a data reduction and analysis software program developed to systematically reduce and analyze HartRAO’s drift scan data collected by HartRAO’s 26m telescope. The software is a newly developed program intended to replace the old LINES program previously used at HartRAO.

The package was built on Python 3.8 and provides a set of tools to perform common analysis tasks that include but are not limited to,

  • Data extraction and preperation,

  • Data modeling and fitting, as well as

  • Data visualization

Caution

This project is under active development

How does it work ?

DRAN uses a simple workflow which can be summarised as follows. When a file is read-in, the program creates a dictionary where all the extracted and calculated source parmeters are stored.

It then proceeds to

  • cleans or filter out any Radio frequency interference (RFI) present in the data

  • correct or remove any drift that may be present in the data due to telescope effects, and

  • tries to fit the peak of the signal ( i.e. upper 20 - 50% of the beam) depending on how good the signal is after cleansing.

The result and other statistics are then written into a database where they can then be analysed using various statistical tools. All accompanying plots are stored in the plots folder created in the users current working directory.

Note

Although data is primnarily stored in an SQLite database, it can also easily be converted into a csv file.

The main mode of data processing in DRAN is through the The command line interface (CLI). This interface is best suited for automated or semi-automated analysis. For a more hands on approach a The graphical user interface (GUI) is also provided and is best suited for handling single file inspection, fitting and timeseries analysis.

What’s next

To get a better grasp of how the program works a set of Tutorials have been provided. For instructions on how to install DRAN see the Installation page. To jump right in, a short Quickstart Guide guide is also provided. Also please read through the Caveats to keep updated on the program limitations and assumptions made before beginning any analysis.