About

What is this?

This is a grassroots effort to describe data formats that are in use, but are not specified anywhere else. Examples range from FITS format instrument response functions for imaging atmospheric Cherenkov telescopes (IACTs) to YAML format spectral and spatial model specifications, to high-level analysis results like spectra and light curves.

The formats described here and the whole effort are not official in any way, i.e. not supported or ratified by any institutes, collaborations or committees. In some cases the formats described here will likely be adopted or superceded by more official formats in the coming years.

Everyone is welcome to adopt these formats or even contribute, development and discussion is done openly on Github. Especially if you are a software library or tool developer, we encourage you to support the formats described here instead of inventing your own.

How to contribute?

The documentation is written in restructured text (RST) and rendered to HTML and PDF with Sphinx and hosted at Readthedocs.

Everyone can contribute by making a pull request with a change or addition to https://github.com/open-gamma-ray-astro/gamma-astro-data-formats or by sending comments and feedback via the Github issue tracker, or, for high-level and important things, to https://lists.nasa.gov/mailman/listinfo/open-gamma-ray-astro .

We use the Sphinx Readthedocs theme as described here, i.e. to build the HTML docs locally you have to pip install sphinx_rtd_theme before make html.

References

Existing FITS specs and recommendations:

• http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_home.html
• http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/registry/grouping.html

Existing HEASARC specs and recommendations:

• https://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/ofwg/ofwg_recomm.html
• http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/heasarc/caldb/caldb_doc.html