CASA Priorities for April 2012 release

This section is a collection of suggestions made during the course of the workshop (list only reflects chronology)

  • Bold: These were explicitly mentioned by Crystal as being interesting development suggestions

Day 1

Calibration Questions
  • Spectral sweeps in relation to Titan. Related to emission lines being extensive in calibration bandpass (atmospheric effects, etc.). Adam Leroy
  • Better documentation on what WVRG is using. Make sure averaging is doing something sensible. Crystal
  • John Hibbard: obvious flagging should be done before looking at the data initially. importALMA task would do this.
  • Crystal: option to un-normalize data for data calibration purposes.
  • Crystal: redo guides, take out concatenation. Calibration needs capability to be able to select on ObsID.
  • Scott: CLEAN takes datasets as a string. Crystal: remove warning on mfs not working. It actually does.
  • Crystal: Use a consistent reference antenna in casaguides.
  • General question: Q16. Might be able automatically flag the autocorrelation data (done by importALMA). Crystal recommends keeping in the autocorrelation for debugging purposes with the correlator folks.
  • Crystal: Get Todd's Weather plotting stuff into CASA.
  • Martin: remove delay correction stuff from the CASAguide. Crystal: take it out all together, or put in the K correction stuff.
  • Crystal: Move fixplanets earlier in the guides.
  • Q56: Steve M. mentions calculating decorrelation might be helpful
  • Crystal: gaincal default minblperant is 2, it should be changed to at least 3 for phase, 4 for amplitude (which is reflected in the documentation, but not the task).
  • Q63: please make it possible to create a way to introduce a break when there is a phase jump (possible in MIRIAD).
  • Joe M: Should be able to manipulate weights (before tsys calibration). This refers to Q81. How to undo applycal weight application.

In Depth Questions for GM and KG
  • Crystal: a supplemental flag table for shadowing.

Flagging/plotting questions
  • None mentioned during this session

Day 2

CASA Parallelization Status
  • None mentioned in this session.

Pipeline Status
  • Joe: mentioned what sort of data assessments are in place? SNR, etc. Ed said it is mostly imaging, reports in html. So, it seems like user feedback would be the pipeline should go more into the numbers, not just clean images.

Image Analysis
  • Joe's query on if this region area stuff could be used in CLEAN was confirmed by Dave to be implemented by Urvashi.
  • Spectral line search: splatalog. Joe had submitted a request to Tony via email. He will put the request in JIRA.

Imaging Questions
  • None mentioned this session.

Imaging/Self Calibration Questions
  • Adam: Channel isolation in CLEAN. Crystal: there should be warnings about this in the documentation, but CASA is not going to deal with this.
  • Q7 (imaging) Is there any ability for CLEAN to make theoretical noise maps now that Tsys tables are in place? This might simplify the comparison in the guides where one checks the noise vs. expectations (especially for mosaics) - comes up in all the imaging guides. They'd also be useful for image analysis. Just curious if this is in there or qualifies as a "wish list" item.
  • Q30 (imaging):During cleaning, the casaguide discusses the residuals inside the mask and outside it. I believe these assessments are intended to be made at this point just by eyeballing the images. True? Or can we calculate the rms inside and outside the mask, somehow? Some additional statistics that would be helpful if displayed.
  • Q39 (imaging): Ed action item to take care of padding being done by clean to the imsize underneath.
  • Q41 (imaging): circle tool drawing "handles" on the circle. that's a bug, it should be reported in JIRA.

Data Reduction Expectations for Manual QA2 in Cycle 0
  • Steve: what do you need? Ed:Automatic boxing from the pipeline (or CASA). In relation to what data products are we providing for Manual QA2, Cycle 0.

Future CASA development priorities (v3.4 in particular)
  • Color legend for plotms. plotms needs to get a new hire before development can continue.
  • Adam: Log crawling. needs flux scale output. Crystal: JIRA ticket has been submitted
  • Scott: Plotms wait time was too long. Can we have plotms plot every point faster.
  • Kartik: plotting the nth point as opposed to averaging. Crystal: nth point is dangerous (outliers).
  • Steve: Is it deemed in particular cycle 0 that we can live with plotcal? Crystal: No, but staffing is the issue.
  • Kartik: parallelization, he wants to be able to do it.
  • Jim B.: Clean output is confusing, provide better feedback in the logger and on the GUI. He wasn't sure what clean was doing at a given time. Crystal: They are going to begin an overhaul on this stuff.
  • Jim B.: Listobs listed the sources in 1 second intervals. He wanted to see the list of sources sequential. Crystal: this is fixed in test, will be fixed in the upcoming release.
  • Steve: More or less what we are asking for in QA2 is more or less what we do in a casaguide. Took Steve a day or 2 to go through a casaguide. Anything we can do to help that from going to a week or two for each observed project?
  • Crystal: the most limiting for cycle 0: we cannot smooth in freq in the bandpass. This is something George would need to fix. solint in freq.

Looking toward Cycle 1: Polarization and Single Dish
Topic revision: r8 - 2011-09-09, AndyHale
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