NRAO Applications Users Group Meeting - PRELIMINARY AGENDA Date: 2008-05-28 (Wednesday) Time: 1300 MDT (1500 EDT) Video Hub: SOC-conf Rooms: SOC317/CV209 Phone-in: (575) 835-7940 ******************************************************************* Agenda: Send items for inclusion to smyers 1. CASA General News o News on the CASA Manager search o Gustaaf is organizing the CASA presence at the summer school. We need to have scripts ready for the 3 datasets. - VLA Line (Gustaaf) nearly done. - VLA 3C129 continuum polarimetry (David W.) in progress. - mm BIMA N4826 (Crystal/Steve/Debra) needs work. There will be two rooms at Tech for the tutorial, one for the VLA line/cont and one for the mm. There are a bunch of workstations running FC7 in each room. Steve will give an orientation tutorial to these sessions at the beginning of the morning. 2. CASA Patch 2 planning, devlopment, and testing o Patch 2 is aimed at preparing for summer school and supporting the key use cases for those datasets. Release plans are: - preliminary internal release for the summer school - open external release after the summer school o Development has been frozen (as of May 9) and bug fixes and documentation only are underway. o Targets for Patch 2 are in JIRA as "Task" and "Sub-Task" items (the icons with yellow x in a box). New features are described in Main Event agenda item 3 below. o NAUG testing is urgently needed, particularly on the new features described above. Should use the casapy-test version, unless directed to the devel by a developer for a specific feature. o A draft of the Patch 2 Cookbook is available at the NAUG page: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~smyers/naug/doc/cookbook/casa_cookbook.pdf This is under development. Please check for the latest version when testing. o Patch 2 versions of the demonstration scripts are at the NAUG page: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~smyers/naug/scripts/BetaPatch2.0/ 3. Main Event - New Patch 2 Features Highlights: o Global/Local modes Now, the global parameters are NEVER (re)set inside tasks. If you call a task as a function with ONE OR MORE parameters specified as arguments, then the global variables are ignored and any parameters not specified in the call are set to the task defaults. For example, plotxy('ngc5921.ms',yaxis='phase') will ignore the current value of globals and only set the vis and yaxis to non-default values. This is so that scripts can be made to run without worrying about any previously set parameters without recourse to the "default" command before every call. If you use "go" or do not specify any arguments in the task call, the the globals will be used. For example: vis = 'ngc5921.ms' yaxis = 'phase' ... go and vis = 'ngc5921.ms' yaxis = 'phase' ... plotxy() will both use the globals. Note that the old toggle parameters casaglobals has been removed. o Return variables Tasks that used to fill an output variable (like "xstat" in task imstat) now return a dictionary containing the return values. For example, xstat = imstat() will fill the Python variable xstat as a dictionary. This currently works only with async=False. If you use "go" to run a task, then the return is lost. The tasks that return values are: imstat imhead (mode = 'get','list') o New version of the "clean" task This is a merge of the previous invert/clean/mosaic tasks. The parameters have changed, in particular psfmode = 'hogbom','clark' # was alg imagermode = '','csclean','mosaic' # move csclean from alg interactive=True/False # was cleanbox='interactive' mask = [] # now includes cleanbox,mask,region uvtaper=True/False # set outer and inner uv tapers modelimage = [] # now includes sdimage weighting = 'briggs','briggsabs',... # replaces rnorm under briggs restoringbeam=[] # now possible to specify pbcor = True/False # rescale output image for PB correction? Invert can be replicated to make a dirty image using niter=0 The .psf and .flux (pbcor scaling) images are now output See "help clean" for more information o The viewer can be used on images to set regions and output to a file, which can then be input to clean or the image analysis tasks. Use the "Region Manager" from the Tools menu on the Viewer Display Panel. o Plotxy has had many improvements, including the ability to plot using xaxis = 'velocity' o New task "imfit" Can fit a single Gaussian to an image. o Additional immath options New options for mode (other than 'evalexpr') 'spix' : spectral index image 'pola' : polarization position angle image 'poli' : polarization intesity image o Calibration task improvements Changed behavior of solint (solint=0 is now per integration rather than per scan, new options 'inf' (all times) and 'int' (per integration). New parameter combine = '','scan','spw','field' If non-blank, extend solutions over the specified boundaries, e.g. solint = 'inf' combine = 'scan' gives a single solution for all times crossing scans (but not fields or spw). Please look these over, particularly those in contentious areas (plotxy, clean/mosaic). o Some other testing points: - extraneous terminal messages that should be removed - extraneous INFO level logger messages that should be removed or demoted in priority (can set logger to see all messages via "casalog.filter('DEBUG2')" e.g.) - MS history contents (via "listhistory") - inline "help" clarity and accuracy - Cookbook contents ******************************************************************* The agendas for past NAUG meetings are archived at: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~smyers/naug/agenda/ The minutes for past NAUG meetings are archived at: http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~smyers/naug/minutes/