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Welcome to the NICERsoft wiki! This space is for documentation of the codes included in NICERsoft.

Installation and Dependencies

Generally, there is nothing to install. If NICERsoft is installed in <dir>/NICERsoft, then you just need to have the <dir>/NICERsoft/scripts directory in your path and the <dir>/NICERsoft directory in your PYTHONPATH.

psrpipe.py (and some of the other scripts) use the cartopy library to draw maps. This can be difficult to install. See here: https://scitools.org.uk/cartopy/docs/latest/installing.html#installing

I have found that on a Mac with MacPorts, sudo port install py39-cartopy works (replace py39 with whatever python version you are using), but pip install cartopy does not seem to. A conda install also works.

Scripts

The executable scripts in NICERsoft are contained in the scripts subdirectory, which should be in your path. Brief descriptions of the available scripts are below:

cr_cut.py : Apply a count rate cut to a NICER .evt file.

This code creates a binned lightcurve with a selectable bin size (default 16 s) and applies a rate cut on that lightcurve to make GTIs that exclude bins that exceed the threshold. It then applies that GTI to the event file to generate a new file with those time ranges filtered out.

psr_pipe.py : Process multiple ObsIDs of NICER data, applying filtering, making quicklook plots, and optionally adding PULSE_PHASE column.