[daip] Help

[Eric Greisen]

Kajal K. Ghosh writes:

 > I have SUSE operating system in my PC. Could I install AIPS to analyze the VLA archive data.
 > I have never analyzed radio data. Your kind advice will be of great help to me.

It should work okay several SUSE site run aips.  You could go to our
web site
     http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/aips
and follow directions to download install.pl.  To do the binary
download/install you would then do
     perl install.pl -n
and answer the questions.  The web site has a full description of this
process.  This does require that your computer system allow rsync and
cvs operations to the outside world.  Alternatively, you could copy
the tar file also and compile AIPS assuming you have an acceptable
version of g77 and gcc.  Versions 2.95.3, 3.2.3, and 3.4.3 or 3.4.4
are all okay.

To learn about radio data analysis in aips you will have to do some
reading.  The Cookbook chapters 2 and 3 are the basics, chapter 4
introduces calibration and chapter 5 imaging.  These show you how to
do things in AIPS but do not explain them in detail.  There are
several Synthesis Imagin in Radio Astronomy books released in the
A.S.P. conference series which will teach the principles behind the
software.

If your project is simple, then perhaps you could use our primitive
VLA pipeline procedure call VLAPIPE.  You need to get the data from
the archive - see nrao's web page to get to the archive and select the
data you need.  Then run aips and use task FILLM to load the data.
The task FLAGR with parameters SOLINT = 3 times the integration time
less 1 second, VECTOR=-1 and everything else set to default (other
than selecting the input data) does some initial flagging of really
bad data.  Then set up the inputs to VLARUN (task LISTR with OPTYP
'SCAN' halps) and try it.  Better results can be obtained with more
work but this gives a good quick look.

We hope to have a better, easier to use pipeline in future, but that
will take some time.

Eric Greisen