AAS 201st Meeting, January, 2003
Session 55. Instrumental Calibration and Data Analysis Techniques
Poster, Tuesday, January 7, 2003, 9:20am-6:30pm, Exhibit Hall AB

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[55.08U] A Program to Convert Raw Single Dish Data into a Format Suitable for AIPS++

C.R. Clearfield (Harvard Universtiy), J. Castelaz, M. Castelaz (PARI), J.W. Keohane (NCSSM)

We present both the development process and the result of a program designed to interface the recently on-line 26m dishes at the Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) with the standard AIPS++ software package.

Using the standard FITSIO library, we are able to write a series of interface routines that enable the parsing of the raw data from the telescopes' samplers and the conversion of these data to SDFITS (SDF) format.

Our procedure indicates that the well established standards of FITSIO and SDF are flexible on an ad hoc basis. However, we also run into not-yet-defined SDF standards when attempting to convert drift-scanning data into an appropriate AIPS++ measurement set.

Although we are able to convert the data into a non-degenerate coordinate system where one SDF row is able to represent a data point with right ascension, declination and energy specified, we also conclude that the SDF format needs to be broadened in scope to include more standardized support for mapping beyond this ad hoc non-degenerate, multi-row design. Once in SDF format, we are able to use the standard sdfits2ms to import our data into an AIPS measurement set.

This project could enable other small observatories or data-simulation packages to import their data into a measurement set for later processing in AIPS++.


The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: chris@head-cfa.harvard.edu

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