1. Calculating and plotting a FrequencySeries

The LIGO Laboratory has publicly released the strain data around the time of the GW150914 gravitational-wave detection; we can use these to calculate and display the spectral sensitivity of each of the detectors at that time.

In order to generate a FrequencySeries we need to import the TimeSeries and use fetch_open_data() to download the strain records:

from gwpy.timeseries import TimeSeries
lho = TimeSeries.fetch_open_data('H1', 1126259446, 1126259478)
llo = TimeSeries.fetch_open_data('L1', 1126259446, 1126259478)

We can then call the asd() method to calculated the amplitude spectral density for each TimeSeries:

lhoasd = lho.asd(4, 2)
lloasd = llo.asd(4, 2)

We can then plot() the spectra using the ‘standard’ colour scheme:

plot = lhoasd.plot(label='LIGO-Hanford', color='gwpy:ligo-hanford')
ax = plot.gca()
ax.plot(lloasd, label='LIGO-Livingston', color='gwpy:ligo-livingston')
ax.set_xlim(10, 2000)
ax.set_ylim(5e-24, 1e-21)
ax.legend(frameon=False, bbox_to_anchor=(1., 1.), loc='lower right', ncol=2)
plot.show()

(png)

../../_images/hoff-3.png