LIGO GW150914 Data Release & Tutorial

[websterling]

The[/PLAIN] LIGO Open Science Center has released data from the gravitational wave detection along with a tutorial going through some typical signal processing tasks on strain time-series data associated with it.

GW150914 Data Release

From the tutorial page-
This tutorial assumes that you know python well enough, and that you know a bit about signal processing of digital time series data (or want to learn!). This includes power spectral densities, spectrograms, digital filtering, whitening, audio manipulation. This is a vast and complex set of topics, but we will cover many of the basics in this tutorial. You will need the python packages: numpy, scipy, matplotlib, h5py.

Could be both fun and educational

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

So have you played with it yet?

 

[websterling]

So have you played with it yet?

I haven't played with this, yet; maybe over the weekend.

I did play with some data from the 1st run- it required way more software to work with (mostly a pain to install and configure), the tutorial was less instructive and narrower in focus, and there were no events in the data.

 

[websterling]

I finally had a chance to spend some time with this and have a few thoughts to share if anyone is still interested. The actual tutorial page, Signal Processing with GW150914 Open Data, is the output from an ipython notebook. If you're just interested in what sort of data processing goes into extracting the signal from the data, then just reading this page might be enough.

If you're actually interested in exploring the process yourself, I suggest downloading the ipython notebook file and working your way through it. You will need Python 2.7 (Python 3 won't work), ipython notebook, and the numpy, scipy, matplotlib, and h5py packages. You should be fairly familiar with these packages, as well as with digital signal processing, especially filtering. If not, then the code will be hard to follow, and easy to mangle. I'd recommend keeping a clean copy of the notebook file available.

Enjoy and maybe learn something!.

 

[websterling]

I found another tutorial at a blog called Infinite Musings - Rediscover Gravitational Waves with LIGO's Data. This one is shorter and simplier than the one from the LIGO Open Science Center.

The Python requirements are the same and his code is available at GutHub.