BATSE Data Finders (gdt.missions.cgro.batse.finders)

A natural question may be: “Where do I find the data I need?” Well, you’re in luck, because this will show you how to find the data you seek. BATSE Data is hosted publicly at the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) on a FTP server. But instead of having to navigate a winding maze of FTP directories, we provide a couple of classes built to retrieve the data you want. First, you need to decide if you want trigger data (say, from a GRB) or continuous data.

Finding Triggered BATSE Data

Let’s start with trigger data, and assume you know the trigger number you’re interested in (6526):

>>> from gdt.missions.cgro.batse.finders import BatseTriggerFinder
>>> trig_finder = BatseTriggerFinder('06526', protocol='FTP')
<BatseTriggerFinder: 06526>
>>> trig_finder.num_files
131

We don’t really care about the directory structure, we just want the data. So this quickly gets us to the directory we need. There are 131 files associated with this trigger. Say we want CONT data. Is there CONT data available?

>>> trig_finder.ls_cont()
['cont_bfits_4_6526.fits.gz',
 'cont_bfits_5_6526.fits.gz',
 'cont_bfits_6_6526.fits.gz',
 'cont_bfits_7_6526.fits.gz']

Great, there is CONT data available for four detectors. How about TTE data?

>>> trig_finder.ls_tte()
['tte_bfits_6526.fits.gz']

What if we want to move on to another trigger? You don’t have to create a new BatseTriggerFinder object, you can just used cd():

>>> trig_finder.cd('00105')
>>> trig_finder
<BatseTriggerFinder: 00105>
>>> trig_finder.num_files
113

Of course, you don’t want to just list the files in a directory, you want to download them. Let’s download the lightcurve image files:

>>> trig_finder.get_lightcurves('.', verbose=True)
105_4ch.gif ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100.0% • 21.8/21.8 kB • 6.1 MB/s • 0:00:00
105_sum.gif ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100.0% • 13.2/13.2 kB • 76.7 MB/s • 0:00:00

Finding Continuous BATSE Data

Now we want some continuous data. There aren’t any trigger numbers for continuous data. Continuous (CONT) and LAD discriminator (DISCLA) data are available in files that cover a whole day (relative to UTC). To find data, you need to create a |BatseContinuousFinder| object by specifying a time using Astropy Time:

>>> from gdt.missions.cgro.batse.finders import BatseContinuousFinder
>>> from gdt.missions.cgro.time import Time
>>> time = Time('1995-09-23 12:00:00', scale='utc', format='iso')
>>> cont_finder = BatseContinuousFinder(time, protocol='FTP')
>>> cont_finder
<BatseContinuousFinder: 1995-09-23 12:00:00.000>
>>> cont_finder.num_files
18

Let’s list the CONT and DISCLA files that are available:

>>> cont_finder.ls_cont()
['cont_09983.fits.gz']
>>> cont_finder.ls_discla()
['discla_09983.fits.gz']

Similar to the trigger finder, you can use the same object to search at different times:

>>> new_time = Time('1999-01-01 00:00:01', scale='utc', format='iso')
>>> cont_finder.cd(new_time)
>>> cont_finder
<BatseContinuousFinder: 1999-01-01 00:00:01.000>

Now how about downloading the position history file for this time:

>>> cont_finder.get_cont('.', verbose=True)
cont_11179.fits.gz ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 100.0% • 8.0/8.0 MB • 3.6 MB/s • 0:00:00

See The BaseFinder Class for more details on using data finders.

Reference/API

gdt.missions.cgro.batse.finders Module

Classes

BatseTriggerFinder(*args[, protocol])	A class that interfaces with the HEASARC FTP trigger directories.
BatseContinuousFinder(*args[, protocol])	A class that interfaces with the HEASARC FTP continuous daily data directories.

Class Inheritance Diagram