askap-vast / vast-tools

A collection of tools that are useful for the VAST project and for exploration of results from the VAST Pipeline.
https://vast-survey.org/vast-tools/
MIT License
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Enable full survey access #408

Closed ddobie closed 1 year ago

ddobie commented 1 year ago

@ajstewart this is a big one, but it needed to be because of all the changes in the full survey data specs.

Specifically,

  1. We no longer use "epochs". The terminology is retained in all VAST software to save the hassle of changing everything, but they're more like groups than epochs. Specifically, each epoch no longer necessarily contains all fields, and each field can be observed multiple times in one epoch. The reason for this is that the pilot observations were scheduled such that VAST monopolised the telescope for as long as required to observe all fields, which is extremely inefficient and therefore not feasible for the full surveys. Instead, we're planning on redefining epochs to be all observations on a given day (or maybe week).
  2. The field names no longer have an "A" on the end, which was a leftover from when observations were potentially going to be interleaved. Allowing access to data that uses both naming schemes is not trivial, but we can now handle it.