Gildas CLASS files

Pyspeckit is capable of reading files from some versions of CLASS. The CLASS developers have stated that the GILDAS file format is private and will remain so, and therefore there are no guarantees that the CLASS reader will work for your file.

Nonetheless, if you want to develop in python instead of SIC, the read_class module is probably the best way to access CLASS data.

The CLASS file specification is incomplete, so much of the data reading is hacked together. The code style is based off of Tom Robitaille’s idlsave package.

An example usage. Note that telescope and line are NOT optional keyword arguments, they are just specified as such for clarity

n2hp = class_to_obsblocks(fn1, telescope=['SMT-F1M-HU','SMT-F1M-VU'],
    line=['N2HP(3-2)','N2H+(3-2)'])

This will generate a ObsBlock from all data tagged with the ‘telescope’ flags listed and lines matching either of those above. The data selection is equivalent to a combination of

find /telescope SMT-F1M-HU
find /telescope SMT-F1M-VU
find /line N2HP(3-2)
find /line N2H+(3-2)

ALL of the data matching those criteria will be included in an ObsBlock. They will then be accessible through the ObsBlock’s speclist attribute, or just by indexing the ObsBlock directly.

An essentially undocumented API

GILDAS CLASS file reader

Read a CLASS file into an pyspeckit.spectrum.ObsBlock

pyspeckit.spectrum.readers.read_class.class_to_obsblocks(*arg, **kwargs)

Load an entire CLASS observing session into a list of ObsBlocks based on matches to the ‘telescope’ and ‘line’ names

pyspeckit.spectrum.readers.read_class.class_to_spectra(*arg, **kwargs)

Load each individual spectrum within a CLASS file into a list of Spectrum objects

pyspeckit.spectrum.readers.read_class.make_axis(header)

Create a pyspeckit.spectrum.units.SpectroscopicAxis from the CLASS “header”

pyspeckit.spectrum.readers.read_class.read_class(*arg, **kwargs)

A hacked-together method to read a binary CLASS file. It is strongly dependent on the incomplete GILDAS CLASS file type Specification