casata: CASA Tools for Analysis

See also

The new document explaining how to get and run the code: Using casata (i.e., how to get it without revision control!)

What is casata?

At the moment casata is just an idea. But, the idea is:

casata is a thin layer on top of CASA which implements commonly used procedures for analysis of data from aperture array telescopes at radio frequencies.

Environment

The project is aimed on an environment based on CASA, numpy and scipy. I would like to aim that substantially all of the functionality in casata relies on these packages only.

Scope

casata will concentrate on tasks which require, or at least are best done, in the above described environment. This means synthesis calibration and imaging, extracting data from MS, some commissioning tasks, and a few other things. Sorry, no kitchen sinks!

The primary goals to begin with is reduction of astronomical data from ALMA but I hope it will at least be of some use for EVLA data reduction too.

An (unnecessarily?) complicated data reduction script

One way to think of casata is as a CASA data reduction script but with an attempt at careful software engineering. Depending on your taste this may or may not be interesting!

Development

License

All of the code in casata is explicitly licensed under GPL Version 2. Any contributions are assumed to be under this license unless otherwise noted. Each contributors retains copyright to their contribution.

Distribution

The code will always and continuously be published on public WWW servers.

Mailing list

If there is more than one person interested in this project...

The aim is to have development and discussion on mailing lists readable by everybody and indexed by popular search engines.

Version control

The project will be version controlled using the Bazaar tool.

Software engineering

One of the main aims of casata is to aim for a good standard of software engineering. Some of the ways I hope this will be reflected in the code is:

1. As little as possible of duplication of code and functionality within the library
2. Short, reasonably well documented functions
3. High degree of flexibility
4. Properly re-entrant functions that do not use global objects. Because of the design of CASA this may be hard!
5. No use of os.system("rm -rf ") anywhere in the code :)

More information

• Using casata (i.e., how to get it without revision control!)
• Contributing to casata
• Some first attempts at casata scripts
• Accessing measurement set data