Preface

The e-CALLISTO FITS Analyzer began as a tool for looking at the solar radio dynamic spectra recorded by the e-CALLISTO network and for measuring the drift of Type II bursts. Over successive releases it has grown into a framework that also retrieves archive data from several radio instruments, places a radio event in its wider solar and geophysical context, analyzes solar images from space-borne observatories, and reconstructs coronal mass ejections in three dimensions. This guide describes all of that functionality as it exists in version 3.1.0.

About this guide

This is a user guide: a reference to what each window, menu, panel and control does, what it expects as input, what it produces, and which limits apply. It is not a tutorial and does not teach solar radio physics or image analysis. Where an operation consists of several steps, the steps are given as a short numbered procedure; otherwise each feature is described in the place where you meet it in the interface. Short Background boxes summarize the models behind computed quantities so that results can be interpreted and reported correctly; the full set of equations is collected in Appendix D.

The guide is written for observers, students and researchers who work with e-CALLISTO data and related space-weather observations. No programming knowledge is required.

How this guide is organized

Part I, Getting Started

introduces the software, explains installation on Windows, macOS and Linux, tours the main window, and describes the help, update, citation and bug-report tools.

Part II, Working with Dynamic Spectra

covers opening and combining FITS files, the sidebar processing panels, display, RFI cleaning, annotation and measurement tools, the Type II drift and shock analysis, band-splitting analysis, projects and export.

Part III, Radio Data Access

describes the e-CALLISTO FITS Downloader, the Multi-Station Comparison workspace, and the Learmonth and STEREO/SWAVES loaders.

Part IV, Solar-Event Context

describes the GOES X-ray, GOES proton, Dst, Kp and SOHO/LASCO CME catalog viewers, and the SunPy Multi-Mission Explorer.

Part V, Solar Image Analysis

covers the multi-mission imaging workspace: data retrieval, display and processing, measurement and CME kinematics, and potential-field source-surface modeling.

Part VI, Three-Dimensional CME Reconstruction

describes the GCS CME Fitting window for flux-rope and shock reconstruction from several coronagraph viewpoints.

The appendices

list keyboard shortcuts, file formats and outputs, data sources, models and formulas, and troubleshooting advice, followed by a glossary, the bibliography and an index.

Conventions

Table 0.1 lists the typographic conventions used throughout the guide.

The screenshots were taken with the macOS version of the software in the light theme. On Windows and Linux the window frames, fonts and menu placement follow the conventions of the operating system, and in the dark theme the colors differ, but the controls and their behavior are identical on all platforms.

Acknowledgments

The e-CALLISTO FITS Analyzer relies on data from the e-CALLISTO network and its archive, and on the many public archives listed in Appendix C. It is built on open-source scientific software, including Qt for Python (PySide6), NumPy, SciPy, Matplotlib, PyQtGraph, Astropy (Astropy Collaboration et al. 2022), SunPy (The SunPy Community et al. 2020), aiapy (Barnes et al. 2020), sunkit-magex (Stansby et al. 2020) and reproject. Their authors and maintainers are gratefully acknowledged.