paper.md

title	pyuvdata: an interface for astronomical interferometeric datasets in python
tags	radio astronomy uvfits miriad
authors	name orcid affiliation Bryna J. Hazelton 0000-0001-7532-645X 1, 2 name orcid affiliation Daniel C. Jacobs 0000-0002-0917-2269 3 name orcid affiliation Jonathan C. Pober 0000-0002-3492-0433 4 name orcid affiliation Adam P. Beardsley 0000-0001-9428-8233 3
affiliations	name index University of Washington, eScience Institute 1 name index University of Washington, Physics Department 2 name index Arizona State University, School of Earth and Space Exploration 3 name index Brown University, Physics Department 4
date	22 November 2016
bibliography	paper.bib

Summary

There are several standard formats for astronomical interferometric data, but converting between them in a stable and repeatable way has historically been very challenging. This is partly because of subtle assumptions in the implementations of the formats and the complexity of the mathematical relationships between the different formats (e.g. drift mode vs phased data) and partly because data analysis for individual telescopes typically used just one of the standards along with the associated analysis code. New low frequency instruments (e.g. MWA (http://www.mwatelescope.org/), PAPER (http://eor.berkeley.edu/), HERA (http://reionization.org/)), have required custom analysis and simulation software that rely on a range of different file formats. pyuvdata was designed to facilitate interoperability between these instruments and codes by providing high quality, well documented conversion routines as well as an interface to interact with interferometric data and simulations directly in python.

pyuvdata currently supports reading and writing uvfits [@uvfits] and miriad [@miriad] files and reading FHD [@fhd] visibility save files.

References