Sherpa "Watch Out" Page
This page lists noteworthy items and issues about the Sherpa 4.14 release. For the full list of known issues please review the:
Running Sherpa
- Sherpa ploting is done with Matplotlib.
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CIAO 4.11 was the last release to include the ChIPS plotting system. Sherpa automatically selects matplotlib which is the default in the resource file $HOME/.sherpa.rc. The screen output lists the current Sherpa version and versions of the loaded packages.
unix% sherpa ----------------------------------------------------- Welcome to Sherpa: CXC's Modeling and Fitting Package ----------------------------------------------------- Sherpa 4.14.0 Python 3.8.12 | packaged by conda-forge | (default, Oct 12 2021, 21:50:56) Type 'copyright', 'credits' or 'license' for more information IPython 7.30.1 -- An enhanced Interactive Python. Type '?' for help. IPython profile: sherpa Using matplotlib backend: MacOSX sherpa In [1]:
The plot_pkg $HOME/.sherpa.rc line reads:
plot_pkg : pylab
- IPython Packaged with CIAO OTS
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CIAO includes IPython in the CIAO OTS directory which is used by Sherpa and ChIPS to provide command-line user interfaces. These programs create an IPython profile in the directory $HOME/.ipython-ciao.
If IPython users want any personal customizations to be available when running CIAO, they will have to copy them from $HOME/.ipython to $HOME/.ipython-ciao.
- User Python modules must not have the same name as CIAO/Sherpa modules.
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When loading a module in Python, Python first looks in the current working directory for this module, then in the directories listed in the PYTHONPATH environment variable. Therefore, if you have a script named 'sherpa.py' in your current working directory, for example, Sherpa will fail to load because the script ./sherpa.py is loaded, not the Sherpa code. Please ensure that the names of your Python scripts do not exactly match those of Python modules packaged with CIAO.
Data Caveats
- Spectral analyses of ACIS data with a limited pulse-height range
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Before fitting ACIS data sets with restricted pulse-height ranges, please read the CIAO caveat "Spectral analyses of ACIS data with a limited pulse-height range."
A complete list of caveats for Chandra data is available on the CIAO Data Caveats webpage.