Astronomy Software for Algorithm Development (OBIT)

Obit is a group of software packages for handling radio astronomy data, especially interferometric and single dish OTF imaging. This software is made available under the GNU General Public License in the hope that it might be useful but "as is" with NO GUARANTEE OR ASSURANCE of suitability, usability or correctness for any purpose. Obit is developed and maintained by Bill Cotton at The National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, USA. Obit is intended primarily as an environment in which new data processing algorithms can be developed and tested but which can also be used for production processing of a certain range of scientific problems.

Obit is a Unix software environment with a limited set of developed applications. It is an object--oriented set of class and utility libraries allowing access to multiple disk--resident data formats. In particular, access to either AIPS disk data or FITS files. A number of low level applications are implemented such as imaging and deconvolving interferometer or OTF data, High-level applications may be either compiled c programs or python scripts; most of the high-level operations have bindings to python. Obit applications are interoperable with Classic AIPS and the ObitTalk python interface gives access to AIPS tasks as well as Obit libraries and tasks.

A preprint of a paper describing the Obit package submitted to PASP is available.