psrmatch: Known source matching

This repository contains software to efficiently cross-match large numbers of single-pulse candidates with known sources from the ATNF pulsar catalogue and other source catalogues. The cross-matching is based on their detected sky locations and dispersion measures. The code is mainly developed for Python 3, but Python 2 from version 2.7 onwards should work fine.

Author

The software is primarily developed and maintained by Fabian Jankowski. For more information feel free to contact me via: fabian.jankowski at manchester.ac.uk.

Citation

If you make use of the software, please add a link to this repository and cite our upcoming paper. See the CITATION file.

Installation

The easiest and recommended way to install the software is through pip directly from its GitHub repository. For example, to install the master branch of the code, use the following command:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/fjankowsk/psrmatch.git@master

This will automatically install all dependencies.

Usage

$ psrmatch-match_pulsars -h
usage: psrmatch-match_pulsars [-h] [--version] ra dec dm

Find matching pulsars.

positional arguments:
  ra          Right ascension in ICRS frame and in hh:mm:ss notation.
  dec         Declination in ICRS frame and in hh:mm:ss notation.
  dm          Dispersion measure.

optional arguments:
  -h, --help  show this help message and exit
  --version   show program's version number and exit

The cross-matcher operates on Astropy SkyCoord objects and input dispersion measures like this:

from psrmatch import Matcher

m = Matcher()
m.load_catalogue('psrcat')
m.create_search_tree()
m.find_matches(source, dm)

The list of supported catalogues can be queried using the m.supported_catalogues property that returns a list of catalogue names.