Astrohack Installation

Installation under Anaconda

When installing Astrohack in an Anaconda environment it is recommended to start with a fresh environment, Preferably under python3.13, as it is the most recent, and also fastest, version of python supported by astrohack. A fresh environment is recommended as to avoid conflicting dependencies with other packages. To create such an environment:

$ conda create --name astrohack python=3.12 --no-default-packages
$ conda activate astrohack

Astrohack reads MeasurementSets and CASA calibration tables through casacoretables, a self-contained build of casacore’s table system that is installed automatically as a dependency on both Linux and macOS. No separate python-casacore install is required (this used to be a manual step on macOS, and is no longer needed).

Astrohack is not yet available for download directly from conda-forge, therefore we suggest to install astrohack by using pip:

$ pip install astrohack

It is also possible to install astrohack from source by downloading the source code directly from github. With the zip extracted you can then navigate to the root directory and make a local pip installation:

$ cd <Astrohack_root_dir>
$ pip install -e .

Installation inside CASA

Astrohack can now be installed inside CASA! this is possible due to a new python package (casacoretables) that reimplements the access to CASA tables so that they can be accessed inside a CASA environment without conflicts with CASA.

For installation inside CASA to work it is required that the CASA version being used is based on python 3.12 (CASA version >= 6.7). The installation can then be done with a simple pip call:

CASA <#>: pip install astrohack

Installation or execution problems

If the user encounters any issues during installation and/or execution of astrohack they should leave an issue here on github or write an e-mail to Victor de Souza at NRAO.