Stingray: Next-Generation Spectral Timing

Stingray is a community-developed astrophysical spectral-timing software package written in Python.

There are a number of official software packages for X-ray spectral fitting (XSPEC, ISIS, Sherpa, …). Such a widely used and standard software package does not exist for X-ray timing, so until now it has mainly been the domain of custom, proprietary software. Stingray originated during the 2016 workshop The X-ray Spectral-Timing Revolution: a group of X-ray astronomers and developers decided to agree on a common platform to develop a new software package. The goals were to merge existing efforts towards a timing package in Python, following the best guidelines for modern open-source programming, thereby providing the basis for developing spectral-timing analysis tools. This software provides an easily accessible scripting interface, a GUI, and an API for experienced coders. Stingray’s ultimate goal is to provide the community with a package that eases the learning curve for advanced spectral-timing techniques, with a correct statistical framework.

Further spectral-timing functionality, in particularly command line scripts based on the API defined within Stingray, is available in the package HENDRICS. A graphical user interface is under development as part of the project DAVE.

Important

If you use Stingray for work presented in a publication or talk, please help the project by providing a proper citation.

Contents

• Stingray and Spectral Timing: A Brief Introduction
  • Features
  • Presentations
• Dependencies
• Downloading and Installing Stingray
  • Installing via conda
  • Installing via pip
  • Installing from source (bleeding edge version)
  • Installing development environment (for new contributors)
  • Test Suite
  • Documentation
• Core Stingray Functionality
  • Working with Event Data
  • Working with Lightcurves
  • Fourier Analysis
• Data Exploration
  • A quick look at a NuSTAR observation
  • Spectral timing exploration with NICER
• The Stingray Modelling Interface
  • The Stingray Modeling API Explained
• Stingray Simulator (stingray.simulator)
  • Introduction
  • Getting started
  • Channel Simulation
  • Tutorials
• Analysing Pulsar Data
  • Simulate a dataset
  • Pulsation search with epoch folding.
  • Z-squared search
  • Thresholding
  • Fit peak with Sinc-squared and Gaussian functions
  • Phaseogram
  • Phase Dispersion Minimization in Stingray
• Dealing with dead time
  • Check Stingray’s dead time model
  • Fourier Amplitude Difference correction in Stingray
• Stingray API
  • Data Classes
  • Fourier Products
  • Higher-Order Fourier and Spectral Timing Products
  • Utilities
  • Modeling
  • Pulsar
  • Simulator
  • Exceptions
• History
  • Changelog
  • Previous projects merged to Stingray
• Get Help, Report Bugs or Contribute
  • Reporting Bugs and Issues, Getting Help, Providing Feedback
  • Getting Involved with Development
  • Contributing to Stingray
• Citing Stingray
  • DOI
  • Papers
  • Other Useful References
• Acknowledgements

Indices and tables

• Index

• Module Index

• Search Page