NRAO CASA Tutorial - 221st AAS Meeting, Long Beach, CA

Processing ALMA and VLA data with CASA

Wednesday, January 9, 2013 | 2:00 - 3:30 PM PST | Room 203A at the Long Beach Convention Center

NRAO will present a Splinter Session on the analysis of Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) and ALMA data with the CASA software package at the 221st AAS meeting in Long Beach, CA. No prior knowledge of CASA or radio interferometric data analysis is needed.

The presentations will provide an overview of the following topics suitable for novice VLA and ALMA users:

  • Interferometry basics
  • Introduction to the CASA package
  • CASA data structures
  • Basic VLA data reduction techniques
  • Basic ALMA data reduction techniques

There will also be a question and answer session.

In addition, NRAO will host a small number of one-on-one sessions on CASA at the NRAO booth in the Exhibit Hall for investigators ready for a more detailed level of data reduction and analysis with CASA, including the opportunity to process data through a few reduction steps with expert guidance using one of our online VLA or ALMA tutorials. These approximately 30 to 45 min sessions will be scheduled by first-come, first-served sign-up at the NRAO booth in the main exhibit hall.

Participants should plan to bring their own laptop to take part in one of these sessions, with CASA V4.0 pre-installed and also a suitable tutorial dataset. For ALMA we recommend the NGC 3256 Band 3 dataset which can demonstrate all of ALMA's current capabilities.

For the VLA you have a choice of tutorial dataset depending on your interest. For those interested in Spectral Line data reduction, we recommend the tutorial
Carbon Star IRC+10216: high frequency (36GHz), spectral line data reduction

For those with specific questions about continuum polarization we recommend the tutorial Supernova Remnant 3C391: 6cm Polarimetry and Continuum Imaging,
Mosaicking, which consists of Part-1 and Part-2

If you have questions about reducing wide-band continuum data we recommend the tutorial Supernova SN2010FZ: Wide-band, narrow-field imaging; C-band (5-7 GHz).

In all three cases instructions about how to download the data can be found in the tutorial. Be sure to obtain the CASA V4.0 tutorial versions, which will be available shortly.

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