TAIPAN tiling code

Original by Marc White

Spherical codes are a selection from http://neilsloane.com/icosahedral.codes/

Disclaimer

This code is BETA. Use it at your own risk. Please notify (or fork and commit!) if you locate any bugs. Any use of this code must acknowledge the TAIPAN Survey Team.

Introduction

This is the initial version of the tiling code for the TAIPAN galaxy survey, to start in 2016. The aim of this code is to investigate the ideal tiling (that is, creation of tiles and assignment of targets to tiles) for a large, multi-fibre spectroscopic survey.

Using the code

Importing

The code can be imported simply into Python by placing the taipan folder in your current working directory or on your Python path, and calling:

import taipan

In the test scripts, taipan.core is imported as tp, and taipan.tiling is imported as tl.

Running the test scripts

NOTE: Some of the test scripts may be periodically modified to test things other than what their name suggests (e.g. computing target difficulties). Be aware!

The test scripts are designed to be run inside an interactive ipython session using pylab. The best way to do this is to use the pylab option when starting your ipython session:

ipython --pylab

The test scripts are designed to run on an arbitrary catalogue of astronomical targets, guides and standards. It is your responsibility to update the test script code to load the data you wish to test on. To request access to the catalogues used for testing during development, please contact us directly.

Note that, to successfully generate the target difficulties for more than a few thousand targets, you may need to raise your system recursion limit, e.g.

import sys
sys.setrecursionlimit(10000)