Usage of buildMinorPlanetPlot

Return to directory of Todd's CASA extensions

The Astro program of Gildas allows one to make plots of source availability vs. LST for the major planets and fixed coordinate sources. But it does not include asteroids. The analysisUtils script buildMinorPlanetPlot takes any list of solar system bodies plus an optional list of fixed coordinate bodies and creates a Gildas astro script. Because Gildas already knows where the major planets are, this task queries the JPL Horizons telnet server for the positions of the non-major planets in the list. Because the JPL query takes a few seconds per object, it's faster to use the name of the parent planet rather than its moon(s). The default observing location is ALMA. The default list of bodies are the primary calibrators of ALMA cycle 0 (or in some cases, their parent planet): 'Venus,Mars,Ceres,Vesta,Pallas,Juno,Jupiter,Saturn,Uranus,Neptune'.

To speed up this task for moons and asteroids, I plan to add the ability to use casa's new predictcomp task to get the ephemeris of minor planets and only fail over to JPL when the ephemeris is missing or out-of-date.

Usage:

CASA <3>: au.buildMinorPlanetPlot(help=True)
Takes a list of solar system bodies and a date, and creates a Gildas astro
script that will plot their elev. vs. time at ALMA.  If useJPL=False (default),
it will first try to use the casa ephemerides to get the positions of the
non-major planets in the body list.  If this fails, or if useJPL=True,
then it queries the JPL Horizons telnet server to get the positions.

Usage: au.buildMinorPlanetPlot(bodies='Venus,Mars,Ceres,Vesta,Pallas,Juno,Jupiter,Saturn,Uranus,Neptune',
                            date='', help=False, cals=[], observatory='ALMA', useJPL=False, 
                            standard='Butler-JPL-Horizons 2010')

  The date format required by Astro is: DD-MMM-YYYY, i.e. 01-apr-2012
  Additional fixed sources can be added as strings, e.g.:
   cals=['3C279 12:56:11.166 -05:47:21.52', '3C273 12:29:06.699 +02:03:08.598']
Observatories can be specifed by JPL ID string, or by the following names:
   'VLA' (which will be converted to = '-5')
   'GBT' (which will be converted to = '-9')
   'OVRO' (which will be converted to = '-81')
   'ALMA' (which will be converted to = '-7')
   'MAUNAKEA' (which will be converted to = '-80')

Example:

au.buildMinorPlanetPlot(date='01-jun-2012',bodies='Saturn,Jupiter,Ceres,Neptune',
                        cals=['V4046Sgr 18:14:10.46  -32:47:35.15',
                                 'J1924 19:24:51.055 -29:14:30.12',
                                 'J1802 18:02:42.669 -39:40:07.97'])

After running this task, you then need to run the Gildas program "astro" which is available on the CV linux systems. In order to access it, follow the detailed instructions which are printed by this task.

% astro
ASTRO> @01-jun-2012

It will create a ps file and convert it to a png (like below) using ImageMagick's command-line utility "convert".

-- ToddHunter - 2011-10-10
Topic revision: r9 - 2012-03-28, ToddHunter
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