Improving Image Fidelity on Astronomical Data: Radio Interferometer and Single-Dish Data Combination (DC2019)

This is the material for the DC2019 workshop. We plan to have all scripts, code, documentation, and presentations here, but our data are typically large and we will supply URLs from where you can download them from.

Combination Techniques

We will probably try out a few techniques:

• feather [talk by Ginsburg]
• tp2vis [talk by Teuben]
• hybrid [talk by Kauffmann]
• ...

Software needed

Since we are going to be CASA based this week, we only support Linux and Mac. WSL on Window10 is currently too slow to be useful (but hasn't been tested).

• CASA: https://casa.nrao.edu/casa_obtaining.shtml. The current release is 5.5.0 (Update, we see that 5.6 was just released on August 8. We will make a recommendation soon, sorry for the poor timing.). We have helper scripts in contrib.
• QAC (this will also install TP2VIS, SD2VIS, and AU)
• TP2VIS (comes with QAC)
• SD2VIS (optional, can come with QAC)
• AU (comes with QAC)

and recommended software

• DS9: http://ds9.si.edu/site/Home.html (the XPA tools can also be very useful)
• vanilla python3 via miniconda or anaconda (an install script is available in dc2019)
• a spectral cube fits viewer (ds9, carta, casaviewer, QFitsView). See also https://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_viewer.html

Data needed

see README_DC2018_data for more details

We should have a USB and portable HDD during the meeting for copying large datasets, but we strongly recommend you come prepared with the data loaded on your laptop. We hope to have an estimate for the minimum amount of space you will need for the experiments, and/or bring your own spare external HDD. It will probably be closer to 100GB than 10GB.

Installation

See the INSTALL file for some current guidelines.