WSClean version 3.4

Released 2023-10-11

Summary:

Version 3.4 contains a few major new features and important bugfixes. An important change is that the default gridder has been changed to the wgridder: in most cases this gridder is fast and more accurate (thanks to Martin Reinecke) compared to the wstacking gridder – the previous default gridder. Furthermore, there are quite some changes that improve complex imaging runs (e.g. faceting, DD psfs, IQUV imaging, etc.), memory & computational efficiency was further improved and various bugs have been solved.

To make use of EveryBeam, WSClean 3.4 requires EveryBeam version 0.5.2 or newer.

Full change list

  • The wgridder is now the default gridder.

  • Add an absolute auto mask threshold.

  • Facet feathering.

  • Support for the MeerKAT and ALMA beams.

  • Compression of auto-masks to reduce memory requirements.

  • Improve efficiency of data & meta-data reading.

  • Allow output of a psuedo-Stokes-I source list.

  • Support applying independent xx/yy solutions when imaging Stokes I.

  • Support for diagonal and full Stokes solution correction and IQUV imaging with beam.

Bug fixes

  • Solve flux-scale issues when using facet imaging with diagonal solutions and beam correction.

  • Solve a crash when the model column needs to be created for measurement sets with heterogeneous spws.

  • Fix a crash when n_spws > 1 and pb correction is used.

  • Improve rank filter when using Briggs weighting (issue reported by A. Kutkin and T. Oosterloo).

  • Fix DD PSF imaging with facets and multiple channels.

  • Fix possible corruption of start time (as written to FITS file).

  • Fix crash in multi-frequency imaging with iquv polarizations and beam correction.

  • Allow full Stokes facet imaging with beam and diagonal solutions.

  • Fix a few compilation issues and warnings on specific platforms.

  • Documentation improvements.