Installation procedure

 

1 Hardware requirements

FESTIVAL uses IDL object graphics and thus makes intensive use of your computer's video board. We recommend that you have at least 128 Mbytes of graphics memory.

FESTIVAL keeps data in memory so as to avoid to reprocess images that have already been visualized. So the more RAM on your computer, the more images FESTIVAL will be able to keep in memory, and the faster it will run! A miniimum of 512 MB is recommended.

 

2 Software requirements

FESTIVAL was successfully tested on PCs running Linux or Windows 7/2000/XP/Vista, on Macs running OsX, and on Sun machines running Solaris.

FESTIVAL runs on IDL 5.3 or higher, however, some nice features (like the colors in the results table of the selection GUI) won't be available if you have a version older than IDL 6.2.

You need a working installation of the Solar software (SSW) and of the Solar software database (SSWDB).

You also need to have locally installed SECCHI and/or EIT and/or LASCO data. FESTIVAL is expecting your data to be located in the standard directory structures (see section 5 below). The possibility to add data from any directory will soon be available.

 

3 Download

FESTIVAL is released as a SolarSoft package. Simply select the FESTIVAL option in the packages section of the installation form available on the SolarSoft site.

 

4 Data download

FESTIVAL can access your local data or download data using VSO. For local data, you have the choice between using the standard catalogues and directory structure (as described in the data installation section), or tell FESTIVAL where your data are located using the search directory dialog. Using catalogues may be faster for requests on large time ranges, while the directory search may be faster for limited amounts of data.

SDO

AIA data can be downloaded from JSOC, the VSO or MEDOC.

PROBA2

SWAP data can be downloaded from the PROBA2 Science Center or the VSO.

SOHO

EIT and LASCO data can be dowloaded from the SOHO data archive or from MEDOC. They are also accessible from the Vistual Solar Observatory (VSO).

STEREO

SECCHI data can be dowloaded from NRL, from the STEREO science center (SSC), from MEDOC, and they are also available from the VSO.

In any case make sure that you store them in a directory structure identical to that of the SSC. The SECCHI catalogues and background images are also available from the SSC.

MkIV

Data from the MkIV coronagraph are avaiblable from MLSO. Select ACOS Data in the Data & Movies pulldown menu. FESTIVAL supports only Mk IV data in rectangular coordinates. Support for the other MLSO instruments will be added in the near future.

NRH

Data from the Nancay radioheliograph will be available there soon.

TRACE

TRACE data can be obtained from the TRACE data center, from MEDOC or from the VSO.

XRT

XRT data can be obtained from the VSO.

 

5 Data installation

FESTIVAL is designed to work with the original data (FITS files) from EIT/LASCO, SECCHI and other instruments. You can either have the data files on your local machine (or mounted via NFS), or access them using VSO byselection VSO in the "search directory" options. If you have data locally, FESTIVAL also needs to find the catalog files for EIT, LASCO and SECCHI data. Then FESTIVAL will automatically find your data files if you respect the standard EIT/LASCO and SECCHI data directory trees. The root of the directory trees must be pointed at by the following environment variables:

Here is an example of how your data tree should look like if you have data from August 2, 2007:

In this example, the environment variables have the following values:

The EIT Level Zero (LZ) catalog (distributed in the EIT branch of the SSW) must be in the root directory of the EIT LZ data (pointed at by the EIT_LZ environment variable). The EIT QuickLook catalogs must be in each daily quicklook directory. The LASCO catalogs for C1, C2 and c3 must be in each daily directory. The SECCHI catalogs are available from the SSC. They must be placed in the summary directories for A & B (see example above).

See also section 6 for the setup of additional environment variables.

 

6 Environment variables

Your local installation of SSW must include the EIT, LASCO and SECCHI branches if you want it to be able to process data from these instruments.

In addition to the environment variables pointing at the data trees, the following environment variables must be properly defined:

SSW must point at the root of your Solar Software distribution.

SSWDB if you are using EIT data. It must point at the root of your Solar Software Database distribution.

Generic SOHO environment variables

SOHO_DATA optional, but needed for accurate orbit corrections that use the ancillary data (d:\archive\soho in the above figure).

LASCO environment variables

MONTHLY_IMAGES if you are using LASCO data. It must point at your monthly average images (normally $SSWDB/soho/lasco/monthly).

NRL_LIB if your are using LASCO data. Must point at the root of the LASCO SSW tree (normally $SSW/soho/lasco).

SECCHI environment variables

SECCHI_BKG if your are using SECCHI data. Must point at the root of the SECCHI background data tree (d:\archive\stereo\backgrounds\ in the figure above). The backgrounds must be stored in a directory structure identical to that present at the SSC.

 

7 Troubleshooting

7.1 Diagnose your SSW and SSWDB installation

It is likely that most problems that you may encounter when running FESTIVAL for the first time will be due to a faulty SSW or SSWDB installation. FESTIVAL is calling the standard SSW prepping routines (e.g. EIT_PREP, SECCHI_PREP) to calibrate the data. Therefore a simple way to check that your SSW installation is correct is to call manually one of these routines. If everything goes well, then FESTIVAL will run. Otherwise, you have to fix your SSW installation before you can use FESTIVAL.

Example:

Let's say that you want to look at EIT data from January 12, 2007. At the ID prompt type:

IDL>list = eit_catrd('12-jan-2007')

If EIT_CATRD crashes, it means that SSW does not find the lz_catalog.cat file. This file should be located in the directory pointed at by the EIT_LZ environment variable. YOu can print the resulting catalog entries with:

IDL> print, list

Then, try prepping the first image of the list:

IDL>eit_prep, list[0], hdr, img

If it fails, there can be two reasons. First, check that your EIT data are not ordered in a directory tree similar to the one showed in section 5 , and that the EIT_LZ environment variable is set acordingly. Second, EIT_PREP need a collection of calibration files located in the SSWDB. These should be placed under $SSWDB/soho/eit/calibrate.

Once you get EIT_PREP to work, FESTIVAL will work on EIT data with no problem.

Similarly for COR1A data from SECCHI, type in at the IDL prompt:

IDL>list = scc_read_summary(date='12-jan-2007', tele='cor1', space='a')

If the result is an empty structure, either your 'secchi' environment variable is not properly setup, or your secchi data (including the summary files) are not properly ordered.

 

7.2 Problems with the visualization GUI

If your video board has insufficient memory, the image panning or zooming may not work properly.

This can be solved by disabling the graphical acceleration within IDL. If you are using IDLDE, you can turn it off from the FILE>PREFERENCES>GRAPHICS menu. Turn the graphics renderer to "software". If you are running FESTIVAL from the command line, set the IDL_GR_X_RENDERER environment variable to 1 with:

IDL> defsysv, 'IDL_GR_X_RENDERER', 1

before starting  FESTIVAL

7.3 Still does not run ?

Contact Elie Soubrié !