Installation

To use piXedfit you need to insall the following dependencies. Some dependencies are only needed for particular tasks. If you are not going to do the tasks, even if those optinal dependencies are not installed, piXedfit can still be used normally for doing other tasks.

Dependencies

  • piXedfit works with Python3

  • NumPy, SciPy, astropy, matplotlib

  • FSPS, Python-FSPS, mpi4py, h5py

  • photutils and reproject if you want to use piXedfit_images OR piXedfit_spectrophotometric modules for doing images processing OR spatial matching (i.e., combining) between multiband imaging data and integral field spectroscopic (IFS) data

  • SEP if you want to use sources extraction and segmentation features of SExtractor for defining galaxy’s region of interest in the image processing.

  • emcee and schwimmbad if you want to use MCMC method for SED fitting with the piXefit_fitting module

  • Astroquery.

How to use the current version of piXedfit

Currently piXedfit is still under active development (and proprietary). We haven’t integrated piXedfit into pip or conda and shared it to public. Currently, to use piXedfit, you can do the following steps:

  • Download piXedfit and put it into your desired directory. Inside piXedfit directory, do pwd command and suppose what you get is PATH_TO_PIXEDFIT

  • Add the following text to .bashrc in your home directory (change PATH_TO_PIXEDFIT with what you get from pwd command above).

    export PIXEDFIT_HOME="PATH_TO_PIXEDFIT"

    However, often time, even after adding the above text to .bashrc, piXedfit environment still can’t be tracked and causes we can’t import piXedfit in our script. To solve this, we can type the following command every time we open a new terminal and execute a script that import piXedfit in it.

    export PIXEDFIT_HOME="PATH_TO_PIXEDFIT"

    This problem also present for the usage of FSPS package. To solve it, we can also do

    export SPS_HOME="$HOME/fsps"

    (if FSPS is installed in $HOME directory, otherwise change it with the path to FSPS directory).

  • In every script that import piXedfit, please put the following lines of text in the beginning of the script

    import os, sys

global PIXEDFIT_HOME
PIXEDFIT_HOME = os.environ['PIXEDFIT_HOME']
sys.path.insert(0, PIXEDFIT_HOME)