Currently the way how IACT data is stored is quite prototypical. The ctools can work with IACT data that is stored following the specifications here. The script csiactcopy can be used to transfer these data from one system to another. IACT data is the property of collaborations (such as HESS, MAGIC or VERITAS) and not publicly available. If you are member of one of these collaborations, you should have access to a central place where the FITS data is stored and maintained.
Note that csiactcopy does not include functionality to establish a conection to a remote file system. For the moment, it is capable of copying data from one location to another. Therefore it is necessary to mount the remote file system where the data is located on the local machine. This can be achieved using e.g. sshfs:
$ sshfs user@remote.server.com:/path/to/remote/fits/data/ /path/to/mountpoint/
The success of this operation can be verified by checking if there is a file called master.json in the mounted directory.
After mounting the file system to a folder of your choice (/path/to/mountpoint/ in this case), the copying of the data can be initiated. To monitor the progress on the screen, the hidden parameter debug=yes can be used. To increase the chattiness of the output, the hidden parameter chatter can e.g. be set to 3.
$ csiactcopy debug=yes chatter=3
Location of remote master file [/path/to/mountpoint/master.json]
Name of FITS production to download [iact-fits]
Destination path of FITS data [/path/to/local/fits/data/]
The name of the FITS production must be available in the remote master.json file. In case the names of the available productions are unkown there are two options to determine an appropriate name:
If the user is interested only in a small subset of the remote FITS production, it is also possible to download only parts of the data. The user simply has to provide an ASCII file containing a list of observation IDs to be downloaded (one ID per line). The hidden parameter runlist then needs to be specified.
$ csiactcopy runlist=myrunlist.txt debug=yes
In case a download was interupted (e.g. the remote file system was disconnected), the script can simply be rerun. The index files which list the files available on the system are refreshed after the copying process. The hidden boolean parameter clobber (default=yes) specifies if the user wishes that local content should be overwritten with remote content. In turn, specifying clobber=no can speed up the process since remote content does not need to be copied if it is already available on the user machine.
To verify the copying process was successful, it is recommended to run csiactdata after the process in order to list available productions on the local machine. The output should now include the copied FITS production name.