WSClean version 2.6¶
Released 2018-06-11
Summary: A “lots of little improvements” update, with no major changes at this time. Interesting new features are some very specific cleaning modes, like linked polarizations and parallel cleaning.
Major & visible changes:
Support for “parallell cleaning” (option ‘
-parallel-clean
’), which splits up images using a path search algorithm, and allows faster and clean and larger images.Polarization-linked cleaning (’
-link-polarizations
’), which allows cleaning a set polarizations using information from another set of polarizations (e.g. clean QUV only using I information).Support for calculating AARTFAAC primary beam.
Tapering is now taken into account in the initial value of the PSF, thereby improving fit stability on tapered runs (SF #134, reported by P. Serra)
Circular and non-circular Gaussian fitter improvements (related to SF #134).
Added option ‘
-beam-fitting-size
’ to allow changing the fitting box size (useful for MSSS).Added option ‘
-divide-channels-by-gaps
’, which changes how bandwidth is splitted in multiple-output-channels mode.Adding option ‘
-pb-undersampling
’ to turn off or change undersampling.Added parameter ‘
-lofar-centroids
’, which takes centroid information into account. This was an experiment, and seemed not to be very useful (it is very slow and does not improve accuracy).WSClean can now grid only the even or odd timesteps (parameters ‘
-even-timesteps
’ and ‘-odd-timesteps
’). Useful for certain experiments, e.g. estimating noise value (SF #133).Option ‘
-no-normalize-for-weighting
’ was removed, as keywords can be used to scale images appropriately.Accept 3d fits masks that have velocity instead of frequency as 3rd axis (reported by M. Ramatsoku).
Provide an error message when automasking threshold <= auto threshold.
Removing
-force-dynamic-join
option, as it is no longer necessary to specify it.IDG command line parameters have been added to the command line help.
Bugfixes / technical changes:
CMake findcasacore script updated to fix unresolved symbols with certain Casacore versions.
Model column was not updated when using ‘
-continue
’ (reported by R. van Weeren and G. Di Gennaro).One-off error in calculating of nr scans, and reporting proper error when requesting more intervals than available (SF #131, reported by S. Bourke)
When writing model data back to MS, progress bar did not actually show progress.
Threading and mutexes are now done with (C++11) the stdlib. This decreases the dependency on Boosts.
Fixed gcc 7.3 compilation: pow10 was removed from gcc 7.3 (glibc 2.27).
Fixed unit weighting to not include flagged/unavailable visibilities during imaging when used.
Preparations for IDG A-term correction: no longer store visibilities preweighted, pass full weighting to IDG.
Do output errors in quiet mode.
Don’t allow rectangular images when IDG is enabled.
Improved readability of non-verbose mode a bit; be less verbose for sets with denormal phase centre and removed some other technical output.
Reported nr of major iterations was one too high (on cmdline as well as in fits hdr).
Invalid floating point cmd line parameters are reported as error instead of interpreting them as zero.
Independent QU imaging with multiple channels would not clean U: weight was not initialized (reported by R. van Weeren).
Also fixing bad keyword ‘WSCMINOR’ in dirty image of second polarization.
Lofar beam correction with only-I imaging causes segfault (Identified by A. Shulevski).