C3

C3 - Command-line Catalogue Cross-matching Tool

In the last decade we entered the data-intensive era of astrophysics, where the size of data has rapidly increased, reaching in many cases dimensions overcoming the human possibility to be handled in an efficient and comprehensible way. In a very close future petabytes of data will be the standard and, to deal with such amount of information, also the data analysis techniques and facilities must quickly evolve. One of the most common techniques used in astrophysics and fundamental prerequisite for combining multi-band data, particularly sensible to the growing of the datasets dimensions, is the catalogue cross-match. The C3 tool to perform catalogue cross-matching, based on the multi-thread paradigm, which can be easily integrated into an automatic data analysis pipeline, scientifically validated on some real case examples taken from public astronomical data archives.

C3 - Description

Related published article is Riccio et al. 2016, C3 - Command-line Catalogue Cross-match. A new tool for modern astrophysical pipelines. Accepted to be published on PASP.

C3 is a command-line Python script, designed and developed to perform general cross-matching among astrophysical catalogues. The tool is able to be easily executed as a stand-alone process or integrated within any generic data reduction/analysis pipeline.

In C3 different functional cases and matching criteria have been implemented, as well as the most used join types. It also works with the most common catalogue formats, with or without header: FITS (Flexible Image Transport System, version tabular), ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange, ordinary text, i.e. space separated values), CSV (Comma Separated Values), VOTable (Virtual Observatory Table, XML based) and with two coordinate systems, equatorial and galactic.

Main features of C3 are the following: Command line: C3 is a command-line tool. It can be used as stand-alone process or integrated within more complex pipelines; Python compatibility: compatible with Python 2.x.x and 3.x.x (up to the latest version currently available, 3.5); Multi-platform: C3 has been tested on Ubuntu Linux 14.04, Windows 7, Windows 10, Mac OS and Fedora; Multi-process: the cross-matching process has been developed to run by using a multi-core parallel processing paradigm; User-friendliness: the tool is very simple to configure and to use; it requires only a configuration file