Contributed CASA Tasks and Scripts

CASA User-contributed Tasks

CASA Contributed Tasks: Overview --- Learn how to use contributed CASA tasks

How to write your own CASA task

• Analysis Utilities (python module) --- A Python module containing utilities for analysis and plotting, including (among many others):
  • Plotbandpass --- a faster version of plotcal for bandpass tables, with useful overlay capabilities
  • EditIntents --- change the intents for a specified field in an ms
  • getBaselineLengths --- returns a dictionary of the baseline lengths in your ms, by default sorted by length
  • lstrange --- lists the range of LST, UT, MJD for the whole ms, and for scans with OBSERVE_TARGET intent (including the elevation range)
  • obslist --- prints the antenna station coordinates in local offsets from the Center of Array, and computes longest/shortest baselines
  • planet --- contacts the JPL Horizons telnet service and returns the J2000 position, velocity, angular diameter, range and range rate of a solar system object
  • plotconfig --- plot any standard telescope configuration of observatories known to casa, and return an array of the sorted baseline lengths
  • plotmosaic --- shows relative location of pointings in an .ms
  • plotPWV --- reads the PWV from each antenna's WVR from the ASDM_CALWVR table in an ms, and creates a plot vs. time
  • plotweather --- plot weather conditions vs. time for your ms
  • plotWVRSolutions --- plot the WVR solutions in terms of baseline-based phase corrections
  • scaleweights -- scale the data weights by a factor, or take thee square or square root
  • searchFlux --- searches the ALMA calibrator database for flux density measurements
  • smoothbandpass --- smooths an existing bandpass table with options for window length and type
  • Spectralindex --- performs a least-squares fit to the multi-spw output from fluxscale
  • TimeOnSource --- compute the total time spent integrating on-source for each specified field

• findsources --- This CASA task will find sources from VIZIER catalogs to place outlier fields on them for clean

• listsdm --- A CASA task to list the contents of the SDM archive files

• stitch --- A CASA task that replaces some channels of a spectral with those of a second spectral window. This is useful, e.g., to remove the 128MHz "suckout" frequency ranges and replace them with channels from a slightly frequency-shifted second baseband

• makeschedule --- A CASA Task to create complete schedules for JVLA observations that can be imported as a scan lists into the OPT, including initial setup, observations of flux and banpass calibrators, pointing scans, and phase calibrators.

• CASA plot3d --- CASA task to quickly inspect a measurement set for RFI by plotting time vs frequency vs amplitude.

• pieflag --- CASA task to flag bad data by drawing upon statistics from reference channels in bandpass-calibrated data.

CASA Observatory-contributed Scripts

• Jansky VLA pipeline script --- The VLA calibration pipeline homepage

• The Nordic ALMA Arc node --- offers a few CASA tasks and scripts, including uvmultifit, fakeobs, and closures

CASA User-contributed Scripts

• getgain --- Reads the EVLA GainCurves file and make a plot for a specified antenna and band.

• Align Cubes by Velocity --- A script that will align two data cubes along their velocity axes

• Mosaicking Utilities --- A few utilities to help setting up and reducing mosaicking observations

• Transient Reduction pipeline --- Simple reduction of data taken in continuum mode to determine a flux density of an essentially unresolved or only partially resolved source

Other Resources

• Software Tools For Radio Astronomy --- A collection of python toolkits for radio astronomical data cubes