galstreams

DESCRIPTION:

The new and improved galstreams Library of Stellar Streams in the Milky Way (v1.0) is introduced. Stellar streams are now supported as track SkyCoord objects (Track6D), rather than the Footprint objects provided in the previoues version (v0.1). The main new features of the library are:

Celestial, distance, proper motion and radial velocity tracks for each stream (pm/vrad when available) stored as astropy SkyCoord objects
Stream's (heliocentric) coordinate frame realised as astropy reference frame
Stream's end-points and mid-point
Polygon Footprints
Pole (at mid point) and pole tracks in the heliocentric and Galactocentric (GSR) frames
Angular momentum track in a heliocentric reference frame at rest with respect to the Galactic centre
Summary object for the full library: Uniformly reported stream length, end points and mid-point, heliocentric and Galactocentric mid-pole, track and discovery references and information flag denoting which of the 6D attributes (sky, distance, proper motions and radial velocity) are available in the track object.

The new library includes 126 stream tracks corresponding to 95 distinct stellar streams (updated as of March 2022). The library is described in detail in Mateu (2023).

LATEST CHANGES

2023/04 The quick plot method is back! Check out MWStreams.plot_stream_compilation() in the Quick plots section of the examples notebook
2023/04 Pandas (v1.3) unit handling error in summary attribute fixed (this fixes errors that came up in the newest pandas versions when accesing mws.summary using .loc)
2023/02 get_track_names_in_sky_window method added for convenience. It provides a list of the stream tracks present in a sky window with limits provided by the user in an arbitrary coordinate frame
2023/02 TOPCAT-friendly csv files containing all stream tracks, end-points, mid-points and the library summary table can now printed when the libraryis instantiated. They are stored by default in galstreams/tracks, but can be saved at any user-defined location if using the print_topcat_friendly_compilation method

REQUIREMENTS

Python modules required are NUMPY, SCIPY, MATPLOTLIB, ASTROPY and GALA.
Installing Basemap is highly recommended (but not needed) for more involved plots. If installing with conda, make sure to update the proj4 library before installing Basemap to avoid errors.

INSTALLATION

In a terminal, run the following command:

sudo python setup.py install

and source your .cshrc / .bashrc or equivalent file.

If you do not have root access, you can install in the custom directory path_to_dir. First, add the directory's path path_to_dir and path_to_dir/lib/python??/site-packages/ to the PYTHONPATH variable in your .cshrc (or .bashrc) file and source it. Then install using the --prefix option::

python setup.py install --prefix=path_to_dir

Add path_to_dir/bin to your PATH in your .csrhc or .bashrc file.

Quick Guide