iLiSA provides a package to make observations on international LOFAR stations in
stand-alone mode called observations and a package to handle metadata about
the configuration of the LOFAR station's antenna metadata called antennameta.
LOFAR is a low-frequency radio telescope array located in Europe.
iLiSA is of interest to people that have access to a LOFAR station or if you wish to process data taken with a LOFAR station in stand-alone mode.
The operations subpackage allows you to make and record standard stand-alone
observations such as:
- BST - Beamlet statics (Temporal power of beamlets)
- SST - Subband statics (Dynamic spectra of each receiving unit)
- XST - Cross-correlated statistic (Array visibilities for one frequency)
- ACC - Autocovariance cubes (XST stepped through all frequencies)
- TBB - Transient Buffer Board (Direct sampling of each receiving unit)
- BFS - Beam-formed streams (Streamed complex voltages of beamlets)
The package also features special observational modes:
- Multi-band BST: BST data recorded over multiple bands, i.e. LBA, HBA-lo and HBA-hi
- SEPTON: Gives HBA an allsky field-of-view. Data taken in this mode is either SST or XST
- Multi-subband XST: Records XST data in over a sequence of subbands
Observation using iLiSA are made with science-level python functions which issue the hardware-level commands to the station's Monitoring And Control interface.
The antennameta subpackage is of interest if you wish access a LOFAR station's
metadata concerning antennas. This metadata includes:
- AntennaFields - Positions of a station's antenna elements
- Delays - Cable group delay per antenna element
- CalTables - Complex, per antenna, gain factors to apply on station array visibilities
This metadata is useful for postprocessing stand-alone data, e.g. imaging XST data, handling TBB data or calibration.
The monitor subpackage provides tools for collecting information on the state
of a station so that operators can easily monitor the health of the telescopes.
The pipelines subpackage enables the setting up of pipelines that process
data recorded during station operations.
scripts contain some high level scripts such as a scheduling tool etc.
Finally, the calim subpackage provides algorithms and processing tool to do
calibration and imaging of observational data.
- Use setup.py script to install
- (If you want to actually access the station) Setup password-less ssh access to LCU via tunnel on the LCU gateway node.
- Requires: numpy (for some features also python-casacore)
- Optional features might require additional software...
Please note that iLiSA is still in development. It has been used heavily on the Swedish LOFAR station. Features such as TBB handling require DAL software.