Problems with installation

[ytsapras]

I've been following the installation instructions here.

The first issue to note is that the Pandeia reference data referred to on that page (that is, pandeia_data-1.5_wfirst) do not conform to the path mentioned in the .bashrc:

export pandeia_refdata=/<path_to_data_dir>/pandeia_data-x.x.x_roman

This is probably not a problem but needs to be updated. As a side note, it would help to have all data files used by the different stips versions listed somewhere so users could download the ones that match their installation.

The second issue to note is when testing the installation, a warning comes up (again, probably not a big problem):

>>> import stips
**WARNING**: LOCAL JWST PRD VERSION PRDOPSSOC-034 DOESN'T MATCH THE CURRENT ONLINE VERSION PRDOPSSOC-036
Please consider updating pysiaf, e.g. pip install --upgrade pysiaf or conda update pysiaf

Running those commands and even re-installing pysiaf from scratch within the stips conda environment does not make the warning go away.

Finally, going to the stips-examples page and executing the commands in sequence produces a series of warnings when generating the stellar population:
WARNING: VerifyWarning: Keyword name 'distribution' is greater than 8 characters or contains characters not allowed by the FITS standard; a HIERARCH card will be created. [astropy.io.fits.card] WARNING: VerifyWarning: Keyword name 'clustered' is greater than 8 characters or contains characters not allowed by the FITS standard; a HIERARCH card will be created. [astropy.io.fits.card] WARNING: VerifyWarning: Keyword name 'radius_units' is greater than 8 characters or contains characters not allowed by the FITS standard; a HIERARCH card will be created. [astropy.io.fits.card] WARNING: VerifyWarning: Keyword name 'offset_ra' is greater than 8 characters or contains characters not allowed by the FITS standard; a HIERARCH card will be created. [astropy.io.fits.card] WARNING: VerifyWarning: Keyword name 'offset_dec' is greater than 8 characters or contains characters not allowed by the FITS standard; a HIERARCH card will be created. [astropy.io.fits.card]

The code then breaks when executing obm.nextObservation() complaining that it cannot find the config.json file in the pandeia_data directory:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: '/home/<user>/Data/STIPS_DATA/pandeia_data-1.5_wfirst/roman/wfi/config.json'

[york-stsci]

The problem you're running into is that you're trying to use a version of STIPS that imports pandeia 1.6 with the reference data from pandeia 1.5, and pandeia changed its format between the two releases.

The installation instructions are currently out of date. They will be fixed as soon as possible. Meanwhile, if you are using the most recent version of the repository (which, based on the error you're getting, I think you are), I would recommend using the STIPS built-in functions to prepare the environment and set up the reference data. In particular,

from stips import DownloadReferenceData
stips.DownloadReferenceData()

This will download the appropriate reference data to the appropriate locations. If you don't have the STIPS environment variables set up, then it will set them up.

NOTE that if there is already data present, then stips will not download reference data, because it can't determine whether (for example) the folder that exists at the pandeia_refdata location is actually the correct reference data. So I would recommend deleting your existing reference data before running the above function.

This is a temporary workaround until the documentation is updated.