Observational Metadata

Metadata define the properties of the data. Properties such as observing frequency, antenna positions, and time of observation are all metadata defined as the data are recorded.

Metadata are required to interpret the data that is read and to calculate the parameters of the search. In general, the metadata is provided by someone else (e.g., in an SDM file), although rfpipe has tools for generate metadata.

rfpipe.metadata.mock_metadata(t0, t1, nants, nspw, chans, npol, inttime_micros, scan=1, subscan=1, datasource=u'vys', datasetid=u'test', **kwargs)

Wraps Metadata call to provide immutable, attribute-filled class instance. Parallel structure to sdm_metadata, so this inherits some of its nomenclature. t0, t1 are times in mjd. Supports up to nant=27, npol=4, and nspw=32. chans is total number of channels over all spw (equal per spw). datasource is expected source of data (typically vys when mocking).

This can be useful for simulating data with datasource='sim'. However, the most common use case is reading data/metadata from an SDM file. In this case, metadata can be read directly from the SDM file.

rfpipe.metadata.sdm_metadata(sdmfile, scan, bdfdir=None)

Wraps Metadata call to provide immutable, attribute-filled class instance.