heliopython / heliopy

Python for heliospheric and planetary physics

HelioPy is no longer developed

As of January 2022 HelioPy will no longer be developed or supported. Most of HelioPy's functionality is now implemented elsewhere:

Finding/loading in-situ data

sunpy version 3.1 (released October 2021) has support for reading CDF files. It also has functionality to search NASA's CDAWeb via. sunpy.net.Fido, which provides access to in-situ data from a large range of in-situ heliospheric observatories.

Generating spacecraft trajectories from SPICE kernels

The astrospice project re-implements all of this functionality, in a much more user and maintainer friendly codebase. It's currently actively developed, and accepting bug reports or feature requests.

heliopy's Issues

Add documentation on how to do testing

Add real data example for loglog plot

Add cluster data import

• FGM magnetic field
• PEACE particle moments
• STAFF magnetic field
• EFW electric field
• CIS particle moments

Add documentation for multi-index data

eg. electron pitch angle distributions imported from WIND.

Add a coordinates module

Add common coordinate systems used in space physics. This should probably be based on the SunPy coordinate module (http://docs.sunpy.org/en/stable/code_ref/coordinates.html), which is based on the astropy coordinate system framework (http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/coordinates/index.html#astropy-coordinates)

Ideas for coordinate systems to implement:

• HEE
• GSE
• RTN
• GSM

Add some docs about pandas dataframes

The main data type that is returned by heliopy, there should probably be a paragraph or so explaining how they work and linking to the pandas documentation.

Make helios download directories reflect new archive directories

See ftp://apollo.ssl.berkeley.edu/pub/helios-data/

Add spice module

Currently https://github.com/AndrewAnnex/SpiceyPy is a really useful python package for loading spice kernels, but it would be useful to have a higher level interface in HelioPy for retrieving orbital information from spice kernels.

Get rid of daysplitinterval

It currently errors on large intervals due to recursion

Use sphinx-gallery for examples

Add option to remove spacecraft velocity from Helios distributions

This was taken out as part of #58, but could be put back in as an option.

add wind/3dp data import

Put documentation online

Try to get readthedocs working again. Probably depends on #5

Add sunspot number importing

http://www.sidc.be/silso/datafiles

Make sure helios data is only converted to hdf if asked for

There's a few locations that it happens whatever the use_hdf config variable is, here's a reminder to fix those.

Add IMP data import

Add what's new page

Add plot examples

Add lists of which helios merged data isn't available

This would save checking for the file online each time a local file doesn't exist and remote data doesn't exist.

Add travis builds for all supported versions of Python 3

Currently the Python docs only have 3.5 and 3.6, so presumably just need to add a 3.5 build.

Add documentation build to travis CI

Update installation docs

Installation docs need to reflect:

• Installation of spacepy
• Installation of the CDF library

Choose a CDF reader to use

Currently HelioPy uses a copy of the cdf reader from SpacePy. This isn't ideal because we don't want to maintain our own cdf reader, and the reader should really exist in an independent package.

Switch docs to using automodapi

A neat little package to automatically summarise modules: https://github.com/astropy/sphinx-automodapi

Add method to show amount of data in data directory

URLs shouldn't be put together using os.path.join

On windows this puts in "" instead of "/", which breaks the url.

Make sure all imported data products have a TimeIndex

... and also no extra time / ordinal columns

Make lots of helper methods private

Most of them don't need to be exposed to users

Add data import and plotting examples

Add note to docs about CDF libarary requirement

Split helios distribution import

Add separate methods for protons, electrons, and the distribution files at the top of the ascii files. Should speed up loading if only 1/2 of these is wanted.

Improve spice docs

Currently there isn't much documentation about the new spice module, some more should be added.

Set a default download directory

Add to conda

xref conda-forge/staged-recipes#4292

Add Ulysses data import

Save data to native pandas file format

This should speed up loading data.

Download Helios magnetic field data if not available locally

Add doc page on pycdf

Move examples to a folder in the root directory

Remove plasma module

Return a MultiIndex dataframe for Helios particle data

Remove dependency on spacepy

Currently rely on spacepy to import CDF files - would be good to have this ability natively.

Add spice data import example

Can use the example I have working locally, with the Solar Orbiter 2020 orbit (yay!).

Allow 'probe' to be either an int or a string

When passing probe to a data import method, it would be good if either an integer or string could be accepted where the probe can be [1,2,3,4] for example.

Return data that has units

Currently all the data returned by HelioPy just returns numbers, and (hopefully!) the documentation says what units the numbers are in. AstroPy has a mature units system however, that allows data that has units attached: http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/units/index.html

One potential problem is that pandas DataFrames do not currently work with units: pandas-dev/pandas#10349 and all of HelioPy revolves around DataFrames, so this might involve finding an alternative for DataFrames. A possible alternative is AstroPy tables: http://docs.astropy.org/en/stable/table/index.html

Make Helios distribution imports take datetime

Currently they take a host of integers, would be much simpler if they took a datetime.datetime, and extracted the relevant information from that.

Fix 'use_hdf' config option

Currently it's parsed as a string, but it should be a bool

Add command line option to not run data tests

See http://doc.pytest.org/en/latest/example/simple.html for how to do this

Add ACE ion moment import

Update badge links in README