Traditionally, Cherenkov telescopes have operated as closed collaborations with proprietary data and software tools, making it difficult to perform joint analysis across instruments. With the advent of the next generation of telescopes and their operation as observatories open to the astronomical community, it became necessary to have open data formats and analysis tools to be shared across instruments. This led to the creation of the GammaAstroDataFormats (GADF) initiative and the development of the Gammapy package.
Gammapy is a community-developed, open-source Python package built on Numpy, Scipy, and Astropy using open FITS-based data formats. It is used for the analysis of 𝛾-ray data from several space- and ground-based instruments. It has also been selected as the library for the CTA Science Tools and is an official analysis package for H.E.S.S. and MAGIC Telescopes. Starting from the event list and instrument response functions at the so-called “Data Level 3”, Gammapy provides pipelines for reducing the input data to binned data structures, which can then be modeled using Poisson maximum-likelihood fitting to produce flux points, light curves, and significance maps. Several techniques for background estimation are implemented in the package to handle the residual hadronic background affecting 𝛾-ray instruments.
In this talk, we will describe the structure of the package and then the capabilities of Gammapy in multiple traditional and novel γ-ray analysis scenarios. We will also discuss the development of open data models and how to create Instrument Response Functions in a compatible format, which can be useful for the upcoming MACE Telescope.
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