This repository contains realtime VOEvent triggering software for the MeerTRAP project at the MeerKAT telescope. The code is mainly developed for Python 3 (and in particular version 3.7), but Python 2 (e.g. version 2.7) should work fine.

The software is primarily developed and maintained by Fabian Jankowski. For more information, feel free to contact me via: fabian.jankowski at manchester.ac.uk.

If you make use of the software, please add a link to this repository and cite our upcoming paper. See the CITATION file.

The easiest and recommended way to install the software is through pip directly from its GitHub repository. For example, to install the master branch of the code, use the following command:

pip3 install git+https://github.com/fjankowsk/meertrig.git@master

This will automatically install all dependencies.

The meertrig software makes it easy to construct and emit a VOEvent packet to a given VOEvent broker. An example is given below.

from meertrig import VOEvent

params = {
    'utc': utc,
    'title': 'Detection of test event',
    'short_name': 'Test event',
    'beam_semi_major': semiMaj,
    'beam_semi_minor': semiMin,
    'beam_rotation_angle': 0.0,
    'tsamp': 0.367,
    'cfreq': 1284.0,
    'bandwidth': 856.0,
    'nchan': 4096,
    'beam': 123,
    'dm': dm,
    'dm_err': dm_err,
    'width': width,
    'snr': snr,
    'flux': flux,
    'ra': coord.ra.deg,
    'dec': coord.dec.deg,
    'gl': coord.galactic.l.deg,
    'gb': coord.galactic.b.deg,
    'name': name,
    'importance': importance,
    'internal': 1,
    'open_alert': 0,
    'test': 1,
    'product_id': product_id
}

v = VOEvent(host=hostname, port=port)
ve = v.generate_event(params, True)
v.send_event(ve)