Background models

The naming of the models in this section follows the convention from Overview.

The documentation on how to produce background models in Gammapy is available at Make background models.

BACKGROUND_3D

BACKGROUND_3D is a background rate 3D cube (X, Y, energy) in units of per energy, per time, per solid angle. X and Y are given in detector coordinates (DETX, DETY), a.k.a. nominal system. This is a tangential system to the instrument during observations.

Two classes are used as container for this model:

• The FOVCube class is used as base container for cubes. It has generic methods to I/O (read/write) and operate the 3D cubes. It also has visualization methods to plot slices/bins of the cubes.

• The FOVCubeBackgroundModel class is used to contain and handle cube background models. It contains 3 cubes of type FOVCube:

  • counts_cube - counts (a.k.a. events) used to fill the model.
  • livetime_cube- livetime correction used for the model.
  • background_cube - background model (rate)

  The class also defines usefull methods to produce the models, such as define binning, fill (histogram) the model or smooth.

Two test files are located in the gammapy-extra repository as examples and test benches of these classes:

• bg_cube_model_test1.fits is a FOVCube produced with an older version of make_test_bg_cube_model, using a simplified background model. The current version of the mehod produces a FOVCubeBackgroundModel object.
• bg_cube_model_test2.fits.gz is a FOVCubeBackgroundModel produced with make_bg_cube_model, using dummy data produced with make_test_dataset.

An example script of how to read/write the cubes from file and perform some simple plots is given in the examples directory: example_plot_background_model.py

"""Plot cube background model and store it in fits.

The 'image' format file can be viewed with ds9.
"""
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from astropy.units import Quantity
from astropy.coordinates import Angle
from gammapy.background import FOVCube
from gammapy.datasets import gammapy_extra

filename = gammapy_extra.filename('test_datasets/background/bg_cube_model_test1.fits')
bg_cube_model = FOVCube.read(filename, format='table', scheme='bg_cube')

bg_cube_model.plot_image(energy=Quantity(2., 'TeV'))
bg_cube_model.plot_spectrum(coord=Angle([0., 0.], 'degree'))

outname = 'cube_background_model'
bg_cube_model.write('{}_bin_table.fits'.format(outname), format='table', clobber=True)
bg_cube_model.write('{}_image.fits'.format(outname), format='image', clobber=True)

plt.show()

The data of the cube can be accessed via:

energy_bin = bg_cube_model.find_energy_bin(energy=Quantity(2., 'TeV'))
det_bin = bg_cube_model.find_det_bin(det=Angle([0., 0.], 'degree'))
bg_cube_model.background[energy_bin, det_bin[1], det_bin[0]]