Daily Image
31-07-2025
Spinifex
| Submitter: | Maaijke Mevius, Tammo Jan Dijkema (ASTRON), Alec Thomson (SKAO/CSIRO) |
| Description: | We proudly present Spinifex, a new tool to calculate ionospheric Faraday rotation measures (RM) for radio astronomical purposes. This software is the result of a joint effort between Astron and CSIRO. It combines ionospheric models - mainly based on GNSS measurements - with those of the Earth's magnetic field. Spinifex provides all functionality that used to be available in RMExtract, which was a combination of C, Fortran and Python. The new pure Python implementation is fully statically typed, which makes development and maintenance easier. In addition, Spinifex improves upon RMExtract on several other fronts such as the propagation of error bars from the GNSS data, easier integration with different data formats and new ionospheric models. Its modular design makes it easy to add more models, and current development of the code focuses on more advanced ionospheric implementations. On the packaging side, the all-new repository is based on the ASTRON template for CI/CD (continuous integration / continuous deployment), with several enhancements. Tests in the repository run automatically every change, and the current test coverage currently is 84%. Pressing the release button on gitlab automatically deploys the package to pypi, so that users can just 'pip-install' the new version. An initial comparison shows a good agreement between the model output and ASKAP measured rotation measures. Documentation can be found at https://spinifex.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ |
| Copyright: | CC-BY 4.0 Maaijke Mevius, Tammo Jan Dijkema (ASTRON), Alec Thomson (SKAO/CSIRO) |
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