6. Issues and Limitations

6.1. Memory Issues

Some primitives use a lot of RAM memory and they can cause a crash. Memory management in Python is notoriously difficult. The DRAGONS’s team is constantly trying to improve memory management within astrodata and the DRAGONS recipes and primitives. If an “Out of memory” crash happens to you, if possible for your observation sequence, try to run the pipeline on fewer images at the time, like for each dither pattern sequence separately.

Then to align and stack the pieces, run the alignAndStack recipe:

$ reduce @list_of_stacks -r alignAndStack

For NIRI, this issue is relatively rare given that the NIRI detector is fairly small, but it could happen when trying to reduce a very large number of frames in one go.

6.2. Double messaging issue

If you run Reduce without setting up a logger, you will notice that the output messages appear twice. To prevent this behaviour set up a logger. This will send one of the output stream to a file, keeping the other on the screen. We recommend using the DRAGONS logger located in the logutils module and its config() function:

from gempy.utils import logutils
logutils.config(file_name='niri_tutorial.log')