astropy/halotools

metadata fail the tests

Opened this issue · 2 comments

I have a rockstar catalog and when I try to retrieve the values of viral radius using columns_to_keep_dict, I get this:

The halo catalog and/or its associated metadata fail the following tests:

  1. All values of the halo_rvir column
    must be less than 50, crudely ensuring you used Mpc/h units.

Can anyone help here?

The problem is most likely that your halo_rvir column data is stored in kpc, rather than Mpc, so the data in this column need to have their units converted because Halotools assumes all distances in a halo catalog will be in the same units. This is a very common issue when processing Rockstar hlist files, and so there is a mechanism dedicated to resolving this difference in convention. Have a look at the docstring to the RockstarHlistReader.read_halocat method. The first argument is columns_to_convert_from_kpc_to_mpc, a list of strings. For any column you wish to read in and convert from kpc to Mpc, the name of the column should appear in this list.