Footprint

Introduction

cmb_footprint is a Python tool to visualize where many different CMB and large-scale structure survey regions. The survey database is maintained in footprint.cfg (named footprint.txt so it will download), and summarized here. In addition, there are several routines to visualize user defined footprints.

In addition to the Python tool, we have modified a version of Aladin Lite to plot footprints as overlays. This is an interactive way of viewing experiment footprints. The tool can be found here.

Download/Setup

The code is hosted on github here. The code runs on both Python 2.7 (checked on 2.7.10) and Python 3 (checked on 3.4.3). Additionally, several Python modules are required. They are

• Numpy
• Matplotlib
• Healpy
• Astropy
• Scipy

Numpy, Matplotlib, and Healpy are fairly obvious requirements. Astropy is needed so that human readable values can be used in the configuration file. Additionally, it is used to read in WCS FITS files. Scipy is only used for the code that converts a WCS to a Healpix map that we can project and plot.

As long as your PYTHONPATH environment variable points to the directory where this module is located (or you manually add it as we do in our examples), the code should run

Some example images from the code can be seen here.