Learning Paths

New to our data and tooling? These guided learning paths will help you build a solid foundation. Each path presents crib sheets in a recommended order, with each example building on concepts from the previous one.

Before starting, make sure you have the relevant software packages installed. See the Software Packages page for installation instructions.

Optical Data

If you are working with optical instrument data (all-sky imagers, spectrographs), we recommend working through the following crib sheets in order. All examples use the optical instrument libraries (PyAuroraX / IDL-AuroraX) and can be found on the Python and IDL crib sheets pages.

1. Explore datasets and observatories - Learn how to discover available datasets and the observatories that provide them.
2. Download and read data - Download raw instrument data files and read them into memory.
3. Download skymaps and calibrations - Retrieve the supporting data needed for georeferencing and calibrating images.
4. Create THEMIS ASI keograms - Generate keograms (time-latitude summary plots) from THEMIS All-Sky Imager data.
5. Create TREx RGB keograms - Generate keograms from TREx RGB colour all-sky imager data.
6. Create TREx RGB montages - Create montage summary images from TREx RGB data.
7. Create TREx RGB mosaic - Combine data from multiple TREx RGB stations into a geographic mosaic.
8. Load and plot TREx RGB grid data - Work with grid files, an array-wide data product consisting of pre-generated mosaics projected onto a regular geographic grid. This format is portable to many other gridded datasets we are developing.
9. Mosaic with satellite location data - Overlay satellite ephemeris positions on top of a mosaic image.
10. Perform ATM forward calculation - Run a forward calculation using the TREx Auroral Transport Model.

RF Data

If you are working with RF instrument data (single beam riometers, hyper-spectral riometers), we recommend working through the following crib sheets in order. All examples use the RF instrument libraries (PyUCRio / IDL-UCRio) and can be found on the Python and IDL crib sheets pages.

1. Explore datasets and observatories - Learn how to discover available datasets and the observatories that provide them.
2. Download and read data - Download raw instrument data files and read them into memory.
3. Plot riometer data - Visualize riometer time-series data using the built-in plotting tools.

What's Next?

Once you have worked through a learning path, browse the full set of crib sheets for more advanced topics - additional instrument types, calibration workflows, custom keograms, multi-network mosaics, and AuroraX search engine queries:

• Python Crib Sheets
• IDL Crib Sheets