🌌 Sneparse

Sneparse is a tool for parsing, processing, cross-matching, and imaging supernovae (SNe) and other transients in sky surveys. This tool was developed as part of research into late-time radio-luminous SNe in epochs of the Very Large Array Sky Survey (VLASS).

Installation and Setup

This project requires:

• python >= 3.11
• Make (optional, used as a task runner)

To clone this repository and install the project dependencies, run:

git clone https://github.com/SinclaM/sneparse.git
cd sneparse
pip install -e .

If you are using anaconda, you can conda install all the dependencies listed in pyproject.toml, except aplpy, which needs to be installed with pip (see this issue). Make sure to still run pip install -e . after the conda installations in order to install sneparse itself.

Catalog data

Sneparse uses the Open Astronomy Catalog (OAC) and Transient Name Server (TNS) as catalogs for known SNe (and tidal disruption events). In order to cross-match blobs detected in VLASS radio data with these catalogs, you will need to download the relevant data.

For OAC data, simply clone the sne-* (and/or tde-*) repositories from the OAC GitHub and place them under resources/oac-data. The resources folder should be placed at the project root; it will be used for catalog data, intermediate results, and results of the imaging pipeline.

For TNS data, use scripts/qTNSm.sh to download catalogs from TNS. For example, scripts/qTNSm.sh -t u 2016 will download all unclassified sources from 2016 into resources/tns-data. scripts/qTNSm.sh is a modified version of the script described here.

Environment variables

This project uses a few environment variable to configure access to VLASS data and catalog databases. The following environment variables should be set:

• DRIVER_NAME: the driver to use to connect to catalog databases (e.g. postgresql+psycopg2)
• TRANSIENTS_HOST: the hostname of the server holding catalog databases. This should be the CIERA transients host, or a server with equivalent databases.
• TRANSIENTS_PORT: the port to connect to on the transients server.
• TRANSIENTS_USERNAME and TRANSIENTS_PASSWORD: username and password for access to the transients server.
• VLASS_QUICKLOOK: path to VLASS quicklook folder.
• QUEST_PROJECT_DIR (optional): an scp URL to a remote mirror of the project, used to quickly update send changes with make put (using rsync). Quest is Northwestern's HPC cluster and stores the VLASS quicklook data used in this project.

Scripts

Files under scripts can be run directly once the project has been setup.

• build_catalog_csv.py: parses OAC and TNS sources into a csv catalog (resources/sne.csv).
• build_catalog_db.py: parses OAC and TNS sources into the transients database (specified by the environment variables listed above). Two tables will be created: a "master" table (oac_tns_all_sne), which includes all parsed sources, and a "cleaned" table (oac_tns_cleaned_sne), which reduces duplicates across the catalogs.
• check_files.py: runs a simple check to verify that most files on Quest are available in the file_definiton table in the transients' VLASS database.
• check_paths.py: runs a simple check to verify that most paths reported in the file_definiton are available on Quest.
• compare_epochs.py: makes images to compare good sources across epochs, populating resources/images/epoch_comparisons with the resulting images. Assumes cross matching and categorization have already occurred.
• compare_unfiltered_epochs.py: prints sources that appear in one or more epochs but did not appear in one or more other epochs. For example, scripts/compare_unfiltered_epochs.py --initial 1 2 --final 3 prints sources appearing in epoch 3 which did not appear in epochs 1 or 2. Assumes cross matching has already occurred.
• cross_match.py: cross matches known sources (placed into a database by build_catalog_db.py) against VLASS blobs in a given epoch (requires EPOCH environment variable to be set to 1, 2, or 3). Writes result to resources/epoch{EPOCH}_cross_matches.csv.
• group_driver.sh: auxiliary script to run plot_groups.py.
• image_driver.sh: auxiliary script to run make_images.py.
• make_images.py: make images for cross matches sources for a given epoch (requires EPOCH environment variable to be set to 1, 2, or 3). Writes resulting images to epoch{EPOCH}_cross_matches.
• piechart.py: simple script to visualize names of parsed sources. Requires build_catalog_csv.py to be run first.
• plot_groups.py: makes images showing nearby sources identified as a group.
• prepare_categories.py: makes folder structure to prepare for image categorization.
• qTNSm.sh: downloads images from TNS.
• query_pairs.py: finds groups in a csv catalog (from build_catalog_csv.py).
• sort_images.py: runs a GUI for image categorization.
• visualize_categories.py: visualizes classifications for different sources.

Many of these scripts are not essential to the core pipeline. To run the pipeline, simply use the targets in the Makefile:

# Run the main pipeline for SNe
make pipeline

# Run the main pipeline for TDEs
make tde