Python3 script to trim or rebuild an Apertif spectral line beam cube
Simple python3 script to reduce the size of an Apertif spectral line beam cube by a factor 2 by cutting the beams in half in x. It assumes that the beams have the standard size of 1321 x 1321 x nchan and reduces them to 661 x 1321 x nchan by omitting all values from x = 6612 - 1321. The full beams can be reconstructed by mirroring the values of the halved beam from x = 1 - 660 and pad these at x = 662 - 1321. nchan must be larger than 1.
The script is run as "local_path/trim_beam.py input_beam output_beam nr"
where nr = -1 for trimming and nr = +1 for rebuilding the beam. The file format used is FITS.
The first line in the script must then be changed to point to your local python3 installation and the script must be made executable with "chmod +x trim_beam.py"
Alternatively one can run the script as "python3 local_path/trim_beam.py input_beam output_beam nr"