Progress report

The last two weeks have been a bit tough. After finishing the observation table generator mentioned in the previous post, I started working on the background module of Gammapy.

I am currently working on a container class for 3D background models (a.k.a. cube background models). The three dimensions of the model are detector coordinates (X and Y) and energy. These kind of background models are largely in use by Fermi. The development of tools for creating such background models is an important milestone in my project and so implementing a class to handle them is crucial. For now, the class can read cube models from fits files and slice the 3D models to produce 2D plots of the background rate.

Two kinds of plots are produced:

1. Color maps of the background rate for each energy slice defined in the model.
   
2. 1D curves of the spectrum of the background rate for each detector bin (X, Y) defined in the model.
   

The figures attached have been performed using a sample background model fits file from the Gammalib repository. (Please click for an enlarged view).

More functionality should come soon into this class, for instance, methods to create the bg models using event lists and the smoothing of the models to attenuate the effects of the statistical nature of the event detection. As I mentioned, I had some trouble developing a more complex class in python and this task is taking more time than expected.I am working hard to keep on track.