MOCpy

[ManonMarchand]

Submitting Author: (@ManonMarchand)
All current maintainers: (@fxpineau, @tboch, @bmatthieu3, @ManonMarchand)
Package Name: MOCPy
One-Line Description of Package: MOCPy allows to read/write, and create Multi-Order Coverage Maps
Repository Link: https://github.com/cds-astro/mocpy
Version submitted: 0.17.1
EiC: @coatless
Editor: TBD
Reviewer 1: TBD
Reviewer 2: TBD
Archive: TBD
JOSS DOI: TBD
Version accepted: TBD
Date accepted (month/day/year): TBD

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Description

MOCPy is a python package that allows the manipulation of Time-Space Multi-Order Coverage maps. These maps are defined by an International Virtual Observatory standard (https://ivoa.net/documents/MOC/20220727/index.html).

Concretely, time and space (on the sky sphere) are described by cells of different coarseness, and a MOC is an ensemble of these cells.

Here are three MOCs (plotted with MOCPy) describing regions of the sky :

This format is particularly useful to perform operations (union, difference, ...) on time and space regions.

Here is the union of the previous MOCs:

Typical uses of the library are:

• estimation of telescopes field of view (uses space information)
• knowing if a satellite has observed a short-lived event in the sky (uses time and space information)

Scope

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  • Data retrieval
  • Data extraction
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Domain Specific

• Geospatial
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• For all submissions, explain how and why the package falls under the categories you indicated above. In your explanation, please address the following points (briefly, 1-2 sentences for each):

  • Who is the target audience and what are scientific applications of this package?

The audience is astronomers. From a quick scanning of the libraries that use MOCPy on github, we identify three major poles:

1. time-dependent astronomy fields (gravitational waves, transients, multi-messenger...).
2. big astronomical databases. They either cross-match astronomical catalogs between each other, or they are building and interrogating databases indexed with the HEALPix tesselation (the one used for MOC space cells).
3. telescope crew that use MOCPy to calculate field of view and plan observations

• Are there other Python packages that accomplish the same thing? If so, how does yours differ?

There is pymoc (https://github.com/grahambell/pymoc), a pure python implementation. It works, but the API is more minimal (no creation of MOCs from shapes, no check to see if a sky-coordinate falls within a MOC, only Space-MOCs no Time-MOCs, no plotting utilities, no multi-threading, ...)

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Footnotes

1. Please fill out a pre-submission inquiry before submitting a data visualization package. ↩