Tools to identify, characterize, and simulate BAL QSOs.

These tools include dependencies to several DESI packages, and it should be most straightforward to use them at NERSC.

To install, clone the repository, add the "py" directory to your $PYTHONPATH, and the "bin" directory to your $PATH.

Note the code expects that you have a directory called "Catalogs/" in your home directory that contains the file PCA_Eigenvectors.fits that is in the data/ directory of this repository. The file PCA_Eigenvectors_Brodzeller.fits is also required if using alternate templates made by Allyson Brodzeller.

See the notebook "DESI balfinder tutorial" in the "doc" directory for examples of how to run the balfinder on SV data and on mocks.

Another option is to run "bin/runbalfinder.py" on the command line. This will run on all spectra for a given tile. There are various options, including to restrict the date range and spectrographs.

Here is a brief description of the files in the "py" directory:

balconfig.py : common modules and global variables used by balfinder

baltable.py : routines to construct BAL catalogs

desibal.py : main balfinder for DESI

fitbal.py : core code to identify and characterize BALs

plotter.py : various convenience plotting routines

utils.py : utilities for manipulating SDSS spectra