Astronomy-specific data loaders

The glue-astronomy plugin packages provides some astronomy-specific data loaders, which are described below.

Spectral cubes

By default, glue can load FITS files, including spectral cubes, but it does not treat spectral cube any differently to other datasets. The glue-astronomy plugin adds the option of loading in spectral cube files using the spectral-cube package, which does several things differently to the default FITS loader:

  • It re-orders the axes to always be as if the cube had been in the longitude, latitude, spectral order to start with.

  • It identifies and corrects certain non-standard WCS headers to use the recommended keywords.

  • It splits cubes with Stokes components into several cubes, one for each component. This means that in glue, a cube with a Stokes axis would end up as a 3-d dataset with multiple attributes, as opposed to a 4-d dataset with a single attribute.

In addition, the loader provided here is able to read in spectral cubes in other formats supported by spectral-cube, such as for example the CASA .image format.

To make use of this data loader, click on Import Data in glue and select Spectral Cube for the type in the window that pops up, then select the file (or directory for .image datasets) you want to load.