Week 7 & 8: The end of second month!

July 29, 2020, gsoc

Hey Sid, how was the second month?

Awesome, lot’s of new learning experiences!

So, tell us about your progress in the last two weeks?

These two weeks went on designing the new data structure CCDData for storing ImageHDU, this was primarily done to make accessing data and header files easier, and secondly, to tackle the file closing issue that was encountered. Let me explain the file issue in brief:

Suppose a user uses fitscollection at a location and gets a list of all FITS files, now by using the generator methods one can collect all ImageHDU listed in the data frame obtained from fitscollection, but once the generator is executed and used for collecting the ImageHDUs, the generator closes the open file handles from which ImageHDUs were accessed, this subsequently leads to error while accessing the collected ImageHDUs since its source FITS file were closed after the execution of generator. So, to tackle this we introduced CCDData which couples the data and header together in memory and can be accessed even if the filehandles get closed.

The CCDData is based on AbstractArray interface which leads to a lot of code being reused with a bit of modification in the function signature.

Hmmm, so what next?

I will be copying the saving versions of images, arrays and filenames from the previously closed PR, which would probably take a day or two. With some minor modifications, it would be good to go to the main code. After this, one can easily see the code in action! Next, I will also be implementing some macros for getting values from header of ImageHDU using keys directly in a method. After all this, we can bump up the version!

Stay tuned to know more!

-sl