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HENDRICS documentation

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Description

This set of command-line scripts based on Stingray is designed to do correctly and fairly easily a quick-look (spectral-) timing analysis of X-ray data. Among the features already implemented are power density and cross spectra, time lags, pulsar searches with the Epoch folding and the Z_n^2 statistics, color-color and color-intensity diagrams, rms-energy, lag-energy, covariance-energy spectra. The analysis done in HENDRICS will be compatible with the graphical user interface DAVE, so that users will have the choice to analyze single datasets with an easy interactive interface, and continue the analysis in batch mode with HENDRICS. The periodograms produced by HENDRICS (like a power density spectrum or a cospectrum), can be saved in a format compatible with XSpec or ISIS, for those who are familiar with those fitting packages. Despite its original main focus on NuSTAR, the software can be used to make standard aperiodic timing analysis on X-ray data from, in principle, any other satellite (for sure XMM-Newton and RXTE).

What’s new

Since HENDRICS 8.0

  • Many bug fixes in HENDRICS, including parameter passing in Z_n statistics, invalid coordinate handling, Numba compatibility, TOA fitting initialization

  • Improvements to OGIP format handling, imageio warnings, and log file management

  • Performance enhancements with memmap in zsearch and new safe intervals in event reading

  • Bad candidate filtering and support for filling short bad time intervals with random data

  • Multiple bugfixes and features from Stingray versions up to 2.3.X

  • New build infrastructure using pyproject.toml (PEP 621 compliant)

See full CHANGELOG for details.

Preliminary notes

HENDRICS vs FTOOLS (and together with FTOOLS)

vs POWSPEC

HENDRICS does a better job than POWSPEC from several points of view:

  • Good time intervals (GTIs) are completely avoided in the computation. No gaps dirtying up the power spectrum! (This is particularly important for NuSTAR, as orbital gaps are always present in typical observation timescales)

  • The number of bins used in the power spectrum (or the cospectrum) need not be a power of two! No padding needed.

License and notes for the users

This software is released with a 3-clause BSD license. You can find license information in the LICENSE.rst file.

If you use this software in a publication, please refer to its Astrophysics Source Code Library identifier:

  1. Bachetti, M. 2018, HENDRICS: High ENergy Data Reduction Interface from the Command Shell, record ascl:1805.019.

and please also cite stingray

In particular, if you use the cospectrum, please also refer to:

  1. Bachetti et al. 2015, ApJ , 800, 109.

If you have found a bug please report it by creating a new issue on the HENDRICS GitHub issue tracker.

Acknowledgements

(MaLTPyNT) 2.0

I would like to thank all the co-authors of the NuSTAR timing paper and the NuSTAR X-ray binaries working group. This software would not exist without the interesting discussions before and around that paper. In particular, I would like to thank Ivan Zolotukhin, Francesca Fornasini, Erin Kara, Felix Fürst, Poshak Gandhi, John Tomsick and Abdu Zoghbi for helping testing the code and giving various suggestions on how to improve it. Last but not least, I would like to thank Marco Buttu (by the way, check out his book if you speak Italian) for his priceless pointers on Python coding and code management techniques.

Getting started

Command line interface

API documentation

Indices and tables