Using Constellations

The pysat.Constellation class is an alternative to the pysat.Instrument class. It contains multiple pysat.Instrument objects and allows quicker processing and analysis on multiple data sets.

Initialization

There are several ways of initializing a Constellation object, which may be used individually or in combination.

Specify Registered Instruments

One way to initialize a Constellation is to specify lists of desired common Instrument platform, name, tag, and inst_id values. pysat will search the directory of registered (see Registry) Instrument modules and load all possible matches. This example uses the pysatSpaceWeather ACE Instruments to create a Constellation of real-time solar wind data.

import pysat
import pysatSpaceWeather

# If you haven't registered this module before, do it now
pysat.utils.registry.register_by_module(pysatSpaceWeather.instruments)

# Now initialize the ACE real-time Constellation
ace_rt = pysat.Constellation(platforms=['ace'], tags=['realtime'])

# Display the results
print(ace_rt)

This last command will show that four Instrument objects match the desired platform and tag criteria. The name values are: epam, mag, sis, and swepam. The only Instrument defining attributes that are not unique are the name values.