VAST Pipeline

This repository holds the code of the VAST Pipeline, a radio transient detection pipeline for the ASKAP survey science project, VAST.

Please read the Installation Instructions. If you have any questions or feedback, we welcome you to open an issue. If you are interested in contributing to the code, please read and follow the Contributing and Developing Guidelines.

If using this tool in your research, please cite 10.5281/zenodo.13927015.

Features

• Code base in Python 3.8+
• Source association/manipulations using Astropy5+ and Pandas1+ dataframe
• Association methods: basic (Astropy crossmatch), advanced (search with a fixed distance), De Ruiter
• Flagging of "New Source" and "Related Source"
• Forced Extraction (Monitor) backward and forward in time
• Parallelization and scalability using Dask API (Dask 2+)
• Data exploration in modern Django3+ Web App (Bootstrap 4)
• Accessing raw pipeline output data using .parquet and .arrow files
• Pipeline interface from command line (CLI) and via Web App
• Web App is served by Postgres12+ with Q3C plugin

Screenshots and Previews

Contributors

Active

• Dougal Dobie – Sydney Institute for Astronomy and OzGrav
• Tom Mauch – Sydney Informatics Hub
• Adam Stewart – Sydney Institute for Astronomy

Former

• Sergio Pintaldi – Sydney Informatics Hub
• Andrew O'Brien – Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Tara Murphy – Sydney Institute for Astronomy
• David Kaplan – Department of Physics, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
• Shibli Saleheen – ADACS
• David Liptai – ADACS
• Ella Xi Wang – ADACS

Acknowledgements

The VAST Pipeline development was supported by:

• The Australian Research Council through grants FT150100099 and DP190100561.
• The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav), project numbers CE170100004 and CE230100016.
• The Sydney Informatics Hub (SIH), a core research facility at the University of Sydney.
• Software support resources awarded under the Astronomy Data and Computing Services (ADACS) Merit Allocation Program. ADACS is funded from the Astronomy National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) allocation provided by the Australian Government and managed by Astronomy Australia Limited (AAL).
• NSF grant AST-1816492.

We also acknowledge the LOFAR Transients Pipeline (TraP) (Swinbank, et al. 2015) from which various concepts and design choices have been implemented in the VAST Pipeline.

The developers thank the creators of SB Admin 2 to make the dashboard template freely available.