Details on the event

17/04/2019

Seminari

Thursday 20/06/2019 @ 10:00, Sala riunioni quarto piano

Michael Janssen (University of Nijmegen), "rPicard CASA tutorial"

With the recent addition of a fringe-fitter, the Common Astronomy Software Application (CASA) software suite, which is the current state of the art package for radio astronomy, can now reduce Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) data. We have developed rPICARD, a CASA-based VLBI data calibration and imaging pipeline built on top of the CASA framework. rPICARD is open-source, dockerized, MPI-scalable, fully automated, and can work with data from many different VLBI arrays. This pipeline was used as one of the independent data reduction paths of the 1.3mm 2017 EHT measurements, which revealed the first image of a black hole shadow. rPICARD is further used as part of a very realistic VLBI synthetic data generation pipeline, which is used by the EHT to directly compare theoretical models to observations. I will briefly demonstrate how we can use this pipeline to make predictions for EHT observations. In the tutorial, I will describe rPICARD's capabilities and show how to use the code. Attendees can bring their own datasets and use the pipeline for the calibration and imaging. Tutorial preparation: participants are invited to download a test dataset for the hands-on tutorial: https://ftp.science.ru.nl/astro/mjanssen/test_data.tar.gz For the download and installation of rPicard: https://bitbucket.org/M_Janssen/picard Please do not forget to download the CASA version specified in the README file. For creating the various calibration plots one can install https://singularity.lbl.gov/install-linux#debianubuntu-package.