Welcome to MAF - the 'Metrics Analysis Framework'. MAF provides a framework to make it easy to read data, slice that data as desired in order to calculate metrics, and visualize the resulting metric data values. In other words, tools to calculate 'some metric value' (e.g. coadded depth, number of visits) for each 'slice or subset' (e.g. set of RA/Dec points, range of seeing) of the original data.
More specifically, we have focused on providing tools to work with the LSST Operations Simulation (OpSim) output, although MAF should be easily adaptable to work with other survey pointing histories or star catalogs, etc. Using MAF you can create sky maps of metric values evaluated over a large set of RA/Dec points (such as a healpix grid), as well as power spectra, histograms and simple summary statistics of those metric values. You can also calculate histograms and summary statistics of single columns in the OpSim data. And most importantly, you can easily write your own metrics to evaluate the OpSim pointing history for your own science.
Skymap of coadded depth in r band across the sky.
Histogram of coadded depth values shown in skymap to left.
Angular power spectrum of the coadded depth values shown in skymap to the left.
Download and install MAF, or follow the links below for more information. There is also an SPIE 2014 paper on MAF.
- MAF Installation and Initial Examples
- MAF Building Blocks
- MAF Tutorials
- Exploring MAF results
- MAF Cadence Metrics
- Common problems
Additional information about the Opsim-specific Opsim outputs is available here and Summary Table Column Descriptions (this second link includes a longer description of the parameters recorded in each column of the 'summary' table recording each OpSim pointing in the simulated survey).
If you use MAF in your work, please acknowledge its use by citing our SPIE paper (MAF reference (bibtex))The MAF documentation is now available online at https://sims-maf.lsst.io