Astronomical Image Processing System, developed by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory(NRAO), USA, is one of the various software packages available for reduction of radio interferometric data like that of the GMRT. AIPS is the standard data reduction package used at NCRA. Here you'll find a brief overview of AIPS setup at GMRT and NCRA, and also some help on getting started with it along with remedies to some of the commonly faced problems and recent issues specific to the GMRT data format. Its curve-of-growth to a large extent depends on your comments which may be e-mailed to aips@ncra.tifr.res.in. Before getting into AIPS please make sure that you have used the latest version of listscan and gvfits to generate the GMRT data FITS files. The latest versions of these and various other utilities are available on GMRT and NCRA machines at /astro/bin/Linux and can be sourced using 'source /astro/RC' or 'source /astro/RC.csh'. If you have used gvfits version 1.11 or earlier to convert the GMRT data set to FITS then use 31DEC04 AIPS or earlier, have a look at the section FAQ and BUGS. This is critical for the datasets with negative frequency increments. Also, if you have been using SPLIT and SPLAT with two-sideband GMRT data, please pause to read the relevant item in the FAQ and BUGS section below.
For the last couple of years, we have been following the practice of installing the latest frozen version AIPS on the general users' and visitors' machines at GMRT and NCRA, and also making available the binaries of the same for our local users for upgradation. We have now moved to the latest 31DEC10, which is updtaed everytime a patch mail arrives from Eric Greisen. Local users are encouraged to download the latest 31DEC10.tar.gz and install.pl from the NRAO-AIPS website for installation on their own desktops. . The precompiled binaries of this version can be found here, for which README is available. For help on locally compiling the source code please have a look at the compiler notes available at NRAO AIPS Home Page. If you face difficulty in compiling AIPS on your computer, it is very likely because of incompatible compiler or missing libraries. Mail aips@ncra.tifr.res.in for help if required.
Before starting AIPS it is required to define AIPS' data areas and also the environment variable pointing to the data area where user wants to read/write into/from AIPS. These can be done as following:
Defining AIPS' data areas
This can be done by running this shell script and choosing the data areas interactively. This will create a file .dadevs in the home area of user say 'visitor' . Or else one may simply create the .dadevs contaning lines similar to
-
/analysis/visitor/ASTRO5_1/
-
/analysis/visitor/ASTRO5_2/
-
/analysis/visitor/ASTRO5_3/
This will
create three AIPS' disks ASTRO5_1, ASTRO5_2 and ASTRO5_3 in the area
/analysis/visitor/ on the machine astro5.
However, if you have predefined AIPS data areas during compilation,
the above step can be bypassed. For example, if you have installed
AIPS in /home/aips/ the data areas are defined in the file /home/aips/DA00/DADEVS.LIST
Now start AIPS as following:
For bash:
>source
/usr/aips/LOGIN.SH
>export
MYDIR=/home/visitor/
>aips
For csh:
>source
/usr/aips/LOGIN.CSH
>setenv
MYDIR/home/visitor/
>aips
If the data areas have been created
using the script (which is true for all the gtac and visitor accounts
at GMRT) then one does not need to source LOGIN.SH or LOGIN.CSH as
appropriate line has been added to .bashrc or .cshrc, respectively.
The description of various AIPS tasks and detailed instructions can be found in the AIPS COOKBOOK. Users unfamiliar with the AIPS environment may find it useful to first go through the easy guide to GMRT data analysis.
GVFITS and LISTSCAN are the utilities used to convert lta and ltb data files produced by GMRT into FITS format. Development of these, apart from fixing minor bugs, has largely been driven by efforts to incorporate new features/observing modes at GMRT and also to keep the FITS files compatible with any changes in AIPS. It is therefore important to use the latest versions of these. Here is some information on the recent gvfits' releases.
gvfits 1.17 : Merges the GSB and old correlator versions into one. This version of gvfits can therefore convert lta/ltb files from both GSB and the hardware correlator. The corresponding listscan is available too at astro0:/astro/Linux/bin at GMRT. The binaries of listscan and gvfits are available here.
gvfits 1.16 : Updated for leap-second correction on 31 Dec 2008. Internal header is now consistent with changes made in DAS-2.05 to improve fringe tracking.
gvfits 1.14 : Corrected bugs in the determination of the start date for the FLAG table. Also added option for honouring flags embeded in the lta data.
gvfits 1.13 : Fixes a bug in which the uvw co-ordinates were not computed at the centre of the integration. Also added some more information in the history file.
gvfits 1.12 : Fixes a bug which caused 31DECO5 version of AIPS to get confused when the frequency decreased with channel no.
gvfits 1.11 : Allows user to label the polarisations as XX/YY or RR/LL (By default they are labelled RR/LL). Also generates the correct FQ table when more than one IF is present.
gvfits 1.10 : Modifications to support the polar and other new modes of the GMRT correlator.
gvfits and listscan are special utilities that are specific to the LTA data format of the GMRT. It is recommended that GTAC users external to NCRA convert their LTA/LTB files into FITS files before leaving the observatory or NCRA, using these utilities.
If you are logged in to one of the GTAC machines at GMRT, follow these steps in sequence
depending on whether you are working with bash or tcsh shell respectively.
before running listscan and gvfits. However, please be aware of the recent bugs in the AIPS tasks SPLIT and SPLAT.
Refer to FAQ and BUGS for more light.
However, finally if you want to install listscan and gvfits locally on your laptop, you could get them from here along with the shell scripts required to set the environment variables. You may have to change the paths defined in the shell script to your local settings for listscan and gvfits to work!
This section
intends to enlist the tasks that are not part of the official AIPS
package but can be installed and used as normal AIPS tasks.
UVFXT:
Task to fix timestamps on GMRT uv-data files within AIPS.
UVFLP: Task to
to re-order channels in GMRT LSB uv-data files within AIPS. Both these
tasks have been written by Dave Green of Mullard Radio Astronomy
Observatory, Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and can be obtained
here. Task UVFXT is useful if you have GMRT data
FITS file generated using listscan and gvfits version 1.12 or earlier
and want to correct for the error that uvw co-ordinates were not
computed at the centre of the integration. UVFLP (along with AIPS
tasks BLOAT and DBCON) can be used to combine lta and ltb (i.e. the
two IFs) data inside AIPS. Although the program `ltamerge' can be used to
do the same with lta and ltb files it may be more convenient to
merge data right at the end, i.e. just before imaging. This does make
sense since the data editing as well as calibration for the two IFs
are anyway done independently. Detailed help and guidelines to
install and use these new tasks by Dave Green are available at the
above link. However, for the convenience of users at GMRT we have
made available both these tasks on all the general user machines. See
FAQ for more.
Right click on the links and "Save Target as" to download the LTA utilities you may require. These are binaries should work on bash/tcsh. The LTA utilities are now called "lute" - it has now reached lute-1.17. This version merges the source codes of the GSB and hardware correlator versions into one common utility for data originating from either. The changes and updates to lute follow those to gvfits. Identically numbered versions of lute and gvfits are tied to each other. All the lute programs are available on astro0:/astro/Linux/bin at GMRT. The most important lutilities are:
ltahdr: Utility to list the scans in the LTA/LTB file
ltaedit: Utility to edit parameters in the LTA/LTB file
ltamerge: Utility to merge the LTA and LTB files. LTA and LTB are two different IFs in default observing modes, and correspond to two polarizations in the HIGHRES mode.
ltacomb:
Utility to combine/concatenate LTA files. LTA1:LTA2:LTA3:.... or LTB1:LTB2:LTB3...
Files can be combined in time order also after merging LTA/LTB files.