Tools Archieven - ALMA Regional Centre Allegro

Allegro has developed a tool to ease the scientific exploration of the rich ALMA Science Archive (ASA). ALminer is a novel Python-based code that enables users to efficiently query, analyse, and visualise the contents of the ASA. Users can programmatically query the archive for positions, target names, or any other keywords in the archive metadata (e.g. proposal title, abstract, scientific category) in a simple way. ALminer’s plotting routines allow the query results to be visualised, and its analysis functions allow users to filter the results and check whether certain frequencies of interest are covered in the queried observations. The code also allows users to directly download ALMA data products in FITS format and/or the raw data that can be used for manual image processing. ALminer has been designed to make mining the ALMA archive as simple as possible, while being flexible to be customised according to the user’s scientific interests. The code is released with a detailed tutorial Jupyter notebook, introducing ALminer’s common functions as well as some of its more advanced options.

Users are strongly encouraged to use ALminer in the lead-up to the ALMA Cycle 9 Call for Proposals to design their projects. ALminer can also aid users in ensuring their proposed observations do not duplicate observations of the same location on the sky with similar observing parameters (frequency, angular resolution, coverage, and sensitivity). Feel free to contact us if you need support in using ALminer.

It is our pleasure to announce the release of ALminer: ALMA archive mining and visualization toolkit!

ALminer is a novel Python-based code that enables users to efficiently query, analyse, and visualize the ALMA Science Archive. Users can programmatically query the archive for positions, target names, or any other keywords in the archive metadata (e.g. proposal title, abstract, scientific category) in a simple way. ALminer’s plotting routines allow the query results to be visualised, and its analysis functions allow users to filter the results and check whether certain frequencies of interest are covered in the queried observations. The code also allows users to directly download ALMA data products in FITS format and/or the raw data that can be used for manual image processing. ALminer has been designed to make mining the ALMA archive as simple as possible, while being flexible to be customised according to the user’s scientific interests. The code is released with a detailed tutorial Jupyter notebook, introducing ALminer’s common functions as well as some of its more advanced options.

For more information about how to install and use ALminer, please visit the documentation or GitHub pages.

ALminer is a collaboration between Allegro, the ALMA Regional Centre in The Netherlands, and the University of Vienna (Austria) as part of the EMERGE ERC-StG project. With the public release of this new software, our goal is to provide the astronomical community with a new easy-to-use toolkit that facilitates the scientific exploitation of the rich ALMA science archive.

If you use ALminer as part of your research, please consider citing Ahmadi & Hacar 2021.

For suggestions and collaborations, please e-mail Aida Ahmadi.

Example of ALminer query for the science keywords “High-mass star formation” with an overview plot of queried observations.