Instrument Detectors (gdt.core.detectors)

Introduction

Sometimes a gamma-ray instrument is composed of many individual detectors, and those detectors may have different viewing directions. The Detectors class provides a simple way to store the detector names, indexing, and pointings so that they can be retrieved for a variety of uses.

For Developers:

The Detectors class cannot be used directly; it must be sub-classed with the relevant information for each detector. As an example, we will create a new class called MyDetectors that inherits the Detectors class, and we will add a few detector definitions:

>>> from gdt.core.detector import Detectors
>>> class MyDetectors(Detectors):
>>>     det0 = ('Detector0', 0, 0.0, 15.0)
>>>     det1 = ('Detector1', 1, 15.0, 30.0)
>>>     det2 = ('Detector2', 2, 30.0, 45.0)
>>>     det3 = ('Detector3', 3, 45.0, 60.0)

In the example, we sub-classed Detectors and added four detector definitions, assigned each one to a class variable. The class variable name for each detector should be a short-hand name of the detector. In each definition, there are four values: the full name of the detector, the index of the detector, the azimuth angle of the detector normal in spacecraft coordinates, and the zenith angle of the detector normal in spacecraft coordinates.

Examples

Based on the use case, you may want to retrieve the detector information using the short name, full name, or index number. There are four distinct ways to retrieve a detector from our Detectors class:

>>> MyDetectors.det0
<MyDetectors: det0>
>>> MyDetectors.from_str('det1')
<MyDetectors: det1>
>>> MyDetectors.from_full_name('Detector2')
<MyDetectors: det2>
>>> MyDetectors.from_num(3)
<MyDetectors: det3>

You can also iterate over the detectors in the Detectors class:

>>> dets = [det for det in MyDetectors]
>>> dets
[<MyDetectors: det0>,
 <MyDetectors: det1>,
 <MyDetectors: det2>,
 <MyDetectors: det3>]

For a detector, you can retrieve any of the properties in the detector definition:

>>> MyDetectors.det0.azimuth
0.0
>>> MyDetectors.det0.zenith
15.0
>>> MyDetectors.det1.pointing()
(15.0, 30.0)
>>> [det.full_name for det in MyDetectors]
['Detector0', 'Detector1', 'Detector2', 'Detector3']

Reference/API

gdt.core.detector Module

Classes

Detectors(value[, names, module, qualname, ...])

Detector base class containing the name/number mapping and the pointing direction in spacecraft coordinates.

Class Inheritance Diagram