Ability to create empty scantable?

[Simon.Ellingsen@…]

I've recently written a script to load data stored as a two column text file (velocity and flux density) and use the ASAP Gaussian fitting and it works very nicely. I do this using code like :

def gauss_fit_data(x,y,ngauss,outname='none') :

# Fit Gaussian profiles to the data f = fitter() f.set_data(x,y) f.set_function(gauss=ngauss) f.fit()

.... where x and y are lists containing the data read from the file.

I would like to be able to create a scantable with the same data in it using scantable._setspectrum (and scantable._setabcissa, although that doesn't seem to exist?). In particular it would be useful to be able to create/use masks, use the in built statistic etc, but there doesn't seem to be any facility to create an empty scantable?

I know that I can fake some of this by loading in an unrelated dataset, but its not very elegant (nor portable).

[Malte Marquarding]

Hi Simon,

this has been on my mind for a while. The problem is that for it to be a "valid" scantable you would need to specify a lot of metadata as well. SO what would an empty scantable look like?

You need to specify:

polarisation type, beam/scan/if/cycleno, sourcename, observatory, observing time, frequency set-up, etc...