Before Running

General workflow

PACMAN automatically detects the most recent run directory from the previous stage.

For example:

Stage 01 reads the latest stage00/s00_run_*
Stage 02 reads the latest stage01/s01_run_*
Stage 03 reads the latest stage02/s02_run_*

and so on.

Each stage creates a new timestamped run directory while preserving previous runs.

This has been updated in version 0.5.0 of PACMAN and was done in order to make it easier for users that are used to the Eureka! pipeline.

In this example we will run start with Stage 00 and run through the last stage, Stage 30.

Decide on a data directory

Create a directory where you would like to store the FITS files that will be reduced and analyzed.

In the next part of this Quickstart, we will download these FITS files and move them into this directory.

Decide on a run directory

Before we can run PACMAN, we need to create a run directory.

All PACMAN outputs will be stored inside this directory. For the analysis of the GJ 1214 data, we will use the following directory structure:

user
└── Desktop
    └── Projects
        └── Observations
            └── Hubble
                └── GJ1214_13021  (="run directory")
                    └── pacman_run_files
                        ├── run_pacman.py
                        ├── fit_par.txt
                        └── obs_par.pcf
    └── Data
        └── GJ1214_Hubble13021  (="data directory")
            ├── ibxy06d0q_ima.fits
            ├── ...
            └── ibxy07ryq_ima.fits

In this example,

/user/Desktop/Projects/Observations/Hubble/GJ1214_13021

is the run directory.

Copy the `pacman_run_files` templates

The PACMAN source code contains a directory called pacman_run_files. It contains the following template files:

run_pacman.py
fit_par.txt
obs_par.pcf

These files are included in the PACMAN package and can also be downloaded here:

Copy these files into the pacman_run_files directory inside the run directory.

You should then have the following structure:

GJ1214_13021
└── pacman_run_files
    ├── run_pacman.py
    ├── fit_par.txt
    └── obs_par.pcf

Note

Only the files in pacman_run_files should be edited by the user. The copies saved inside each stage directory are snapshots of the settings used for that specific run.

Set up the pcf

The pcf is the PACMAN control file and comparable to the ecf in the Eureka! pipeline. It contains all parameters that the user can tune for all stages.

More information about it can be found in the pcf page.

Before starting the analysis, the paths to the data directory and run directory (datadir and rundir) must be set in the pcf (to be clear, in the obs_par.pcf file that is in e.g., /home/zieba/Desktop/Projects/Observations/Hubble/GJ1214_13021).

Navigate into pacman_run_files (in e.g., /home/zieba/Desktop/Projects/Observations/Hubble/GJ1214_13021), open obs_par.pcf, and modify the entries datadir and rundir with the absolute paths to the data directory and run directory, respectively.

For example:

rundir /home/zieba/Desktop/Projects/Observations/Hubble/GJ1214_13021

datadir /home/zieba/Desktop/Data/GJ1214_Hubble13021

At the start of every stage, the current obs_par.pcf and fit_par.txt from pacman_run_files are copied into the new stage run directory. This is just for future reference.

In the next step of the quickstart, we will download the FITS files needed for the analysis using the Python package astroquery.