apipeline

apipeline

Direction-dependent calibration for Apertif. The pipeline is based on the LOFAR Default Preprocessing Pipeline (DPPP/DP3, van Diepen et al. 2018) and the wsclean imaging package (Offringa et al. 2014). It is recommended to use Docker container with the LOFAR tools installed. See the Dockerfile.

Usage:

imcal.py [-h] [-c CONFIGFILE] [-o OUTBASE] [-s STEPS] [-f] msin

DDCal Inputs

positional arguments:
  msin                  MS file to process

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c CONFIGFILE, --config CONFIGFILE
                        Config file
  -o OUTBASE, --outbase OUTBASE
                        output prefix
  -s STEPS, --steps STEPS
                        steps to run. Example: "nvss,mask,dical,ddcal"
  -f, --force           Overwrite the existing files

The config file imcal.yml has sections for every step with the corresponding parameters. Most of the parameters have explicit comments inside the config file. For example the initial section split allows splitting the data by providing startchan and nchan parameters. The next section, nvss, can be used for preliminary phase calibration against the NVSS catalog (Condon et al. 1998).

For more information see:

wsclean page: https://wsclean.readthedocs.io

DPPP page: https://support.astron.nl/LOFARImagingCookbook/dppp.html

Citation: Kutkin et al. 2023 (TBA)