Modular science pack idea

[drvdputt]

In my recent work, I have started a new habit where I treat science packs in a modular way.

An example use cases is as follows:

You have two objects:

1. A PDR
2. A galaxy

And you would like a science pack situation as follows

• dust_feature tuning: keep it the same for both. And you are making frequent adjustment as testing them on both objects.
• dust_continuum tuning: custom for each. And the galaxy needs a starlight component too.
• (lines: separate pack for PDR and galaxy)

In that case you could put the dust features in a general file, and the continuum in separate ones dust_features.yaml, continuum_pdr.yaml, continuum_galaxy.yaml

To load them and combine them into a single science pack, I wrote the following function

from astropy.table import vstack
def make_multi_yaml_model(*args):
    return Model(vstack([Features.read(fn) for fn in args]))

If we think this would be something useful for the general userbase, the minimum effort to implement this would be to just allow Model to take a list of YAML files at setup, and make it apply this function. In practice, it would probably be best to include a few checks though. Most importantly, making sure that all feature names are unique.