Reading/writing time series

Build-in readers

Since TimeSeries and BinnedTimeSeries are sub-classes of Table, they have read() and write() methods that can be used to read time series from files. We include a few readers for well-defined formats in astropy_timeseries - for example we have readers for light curves in FITS format from the Kepler and TESS missions.

Here is an example of using Kepler FITS time series - we start off by fetching an example file:

from astropy.utils.data import get_pkg_data_filename
example_data = get_pkg_data_filename('timeseries/kplr010666592-2009131110544_slc.fits')

This will set example_data to the filename of the downloaded file (so you can replace this by the filename for the file you want to read in). We can then read in the time series using:

from astropy_timeseries import TimeSeries
kepler = TimeSeries.read(example_data, format='kepler.fits')

Let’s check that the time series has been read in correctly:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.plot(kepler.time.jd, kepler['sap_flux'], 'k.', markersize=1)
plt.xlabel('Barycentric Julian Date')
plt.ylabel('SAP Flux (e-/s)')

(png, svg, pdf)

Reading other formats

At the moment only a few formats are defined in astropy itself, in part because there are not many well documented formats for storing time series. So in many cases, you will likely have to first read in your files using the more generic Table class (see Reading and writing Table objects), and then construct the time series object as described in Creating time series.

If you have written a reader/writer for a commonly used format, and it is well documented, please feel free to contribute it to astropy!