mpol-dev / visread Goto Github PK

Migrate docs build and hosting to Github pages

• copy github actions from MPoL
• modify Sphinx build process
• delete readthedocs site

As a validation workflow, we want to compare two paths to (hopefully) the same science product

• take an MS, input a reasonable tclean command, and then get out a science quality image cube
• apply mstransform or our own routines to barycorr and regrid the visibilities, then use tclean with cubedata to get a science quality image cube

Both cubes should be identical, or nearly so.

The default solver used by the minimize routine (BFGS) sometimes has issues with getting stuck on the initial guess. I would suggest changing the solver to Nelder-Mead, which seems to be able to do better.

Is your feature request related to a problem or opportunity? Please describe.
We want to open up visread and the CASA internals to the user as much as possible, so that they can inspect the visibilities provided by ALMA and CASA to immediately spot errors before they get to later analysis.

Describe the solution you'd like
I think one way to achieve this is by writing lots of self-contained reading/analysis scripts based off of casatools like table and ms, and then writing lots of routines demonstrating how to use them.

Even better is if we directly show the user how to interact with the data with the casatools first, and then provide the wrapped routines. Ultimately, a tutorial of an API will be a lot more useful than a blackbox read routine.

Questions to address
We want the user to be able to discover things like

• multiple spectral windows
• multiple polarizations
• flagged visibilities
• autocorrelation visibilities
• tclean model column
• incorrectly scaled weights (using tclean)
• averaging polarizations
• S/N of visibilities

For spectral line datasets

• noise covariance for binned/unbinned

The Python documentation landscape continues to evolve since we last worked on visread in a meaningful way. One simpler solution appears to be MyST NB. We'll try swapping out our current tutorial build for a markdown source solution, following exoplanet.

In line with MPoL #223, change base spatial frequency unit in codebase from [klambda] to [lambda]. I think it's only needed in process.py, as of now.

Github actions CI is not launching on new pushes. It queues for a day and then finds no runners. I think this is because of the specific Ubuntu version required such that we could run CASA. It might be possible to update the CASA version and therefore update the linux host version, allowing this to run.