Software

Galactic Magnetic field reconstruction: GalaxyBasics.py

The GalaxyBasics module is intended to build suitable Galactic space for the purpose of diffuse Galactic emission and to provide all basic functions necessary for coordinate transformations and, in particular, to go from cylindrical Galactocentric reference frame to spherical heliocentric reference frame, i.e. the observer coordinate system. It turned out that this scheme is best suited for line-of-sight integration purpose.

According to the scheme of the GalaxyBasics module, the Galactic space is sampled in concentric shells centered on the Sun at discretized radii. The angular sampling of the sky follows the HEALPix tessellation of Górski et al. (2005) and the radial sampling is simply linear.

To specify a Galactic template, the basic entries are:

• a NSIDE parameter,
• a radial step, and
• a maximum radial distance of the space to be considered (from the Sun).

Download

The current version of the GalaxyBasics module can be found in the .zip here along with the BFIELD.py module.

Installation

GalaxyBasics strongly depends on healpy package for the sky-coordinate sampling. Otherwise, it is a self-consistent Python module which is made to be run in a Python environment such as IPython. It only makes use of NumPy.

History

• First version. July 24th, 2017.