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 Murphy, et al. (2021).

Features

Code base in Python 3.8+
Source association/manipulations using Astropy4+ 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

The VAST Pipeline development was supported by:

The Australian Research Council through grants FT150100099 and DP190100561.
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.