Python library to read, write, and validate "OGIP" files

• aims to support OGIP formats:
  • OGIP/92-007 (The OGIP Spectral File Format)
  • OGIP Calibration Memo CAL/GEN/92-002 (The Calibration Requirements for Spectral Analysis, Definition of RMF and ARF file formats)
  • OGIP Memo OGIP/93-003 (The Proposed Timing FITS File Format for High Energy Astrophysics Data).
• does not aim to implement the strictest form of the standard, instead trying to understand the content from the least information provided, following Postel's Law (which has proven to be successful in TCP).
• well-defined, versioned, and provenance-committed process
• it just works, always while it is also always possible to recover what exactly was done and why.
• relies only on astropy

Existing alternatives:

• heasoft contains pyxpec and heasp modules, which read ogip files.
• sherpa and 3ml can read and write ogip files

The alertnatives share common disadvantage: they are complex and not easily portable packages. Also, they implement different variations of the standards, and we have a different aim here (see above).

Disadvantages:

• only python, hence slow

Example

# opens a file, detects format, writes
ogip.core.open_something("file.fits").to_fits('output_file.fits')