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Blimpy: Breakthrough Listen I/O Methods for Python |
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27 June 2019 |
paper.bib |
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) has historically used radio astronomy data as the main venue to search for artificial signals of extraterrestrial origin. The Breakthrough Listen program is the latest large-scale project for the search of technosignatures, and thanks to modern telescopes and instrumentation, as well as significant amounts of dedicated observing time, the program has become the largest SETI endeavour in history. This has also resulted in an unprecedented amount of publicly-available data [@Lebofsky:2019]. Over 1 PB of data from the Breakthrough Listen program may be downloaded from seti.berkeley.edu/opendata.
The Blimpy---Breakthrough Listen I/O Methods for Python---package provides Python 2.7+/3.6+ utilities
for viewing and interacting with the data formats used within the Breakthrough Listen program.
This includes Sigproc filterbank (.fil) and HDF5 (.h5) files that contain dynamic spectra (aka 'waterfalls'),
and GUPPI raw (.raw) files that contain voltage-level data. Python methods for data extraction,
calibration, and visualization are provided. A suite of command-line utilities are also available.
The waterfall data product stores an array of detected power across frequency channel (i.e. spectra) over time.
These files can be several GB in size, with up to billions of channels and/or hundreds of thousands of time steps. Blimpy provides
convenient methods to extract frequencies and time slices of interest---without loading the full file into memory--which
are presented as Numpy arrays [@Numpy:2011]. Methods for manipulating lower-level voltage data products
stored in the GUPPI raw format, as generated by the Green Bank Telescope, are also provided.
Blimpy uses the Matplotlib library [@Pylab:2007] to provide plotting of spectra, time series, and dynamic spectra;
the Astropy package for handling of astronomical coordinates [@Astropy:2013; @Astropy:2018]; and,
the H5py package to interact with data stored in HDF5 files [@H5py:2013]. The turboSETI package, which conducts doppler acceleration searches for narrowband signals that would indicate the presence of technologically-capable life beyond Earth, uses Blimpy for file handling and diagnostic plotting.
Blimpy was designed to be used by radio astronomers, students and anyone else interested in accessing
Breakthrough Listen data, whether searching for SETI signals, spectral lines, pulsars, fast radio bursts, or other astrophysical phenomena. It has already been used in a number of scientific publications
[@Croft:2016; @Enriquez:2017; @Enriquez:2018; @Enriquez:2019; @Gajjar:2018; @Price:2019a; @Price:2019b].
We thank G. Molenaar and B. Brzycki for their code contributions, along with G. Zhang, G. Hellbourg, N. Richard, M. Lebofsky, G. Foster, C. Gilbertson, and the wider Breakthrough Listen collaboration. Breakthrough Listen is managed by the Breakthrough Initiatives, sponsored by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation.