Oral Abstract

Oral Contribution (O5.3) Harro Verkouter (Joint Institute for VLBI - ERIC)

Theme: Data visualisation from line plots to augmented & virtual reality

jiveplot: Inspecting large volumes of raw radio data made easy

Many radio telescopes (ALMA, LOFAR, VLA, ...) deliver their voluminous data in the so-called MeasurementSet (MS) format: the native data format of CASA. At the Joint Institute for VLBI in Europe we operate several correlators and have been using MS as internal format since 1997.

These radio-astronomical data volumes are typically very large and cannot be easily imaged - a topic of its own. But long before imaging takes place, the data must be inspected for quality or being able to find/diagnose problems. We find the CASA tool for inspection lacking for production use: it is slow, does not provide functions we need for commissioning and cannot be scripted for use in our pre-release-to-user pipeline.

Fortunately, there is a Python binding to the MS format - allowing anyone to develop useful tools outside the CASA ecosystem. In this talk I will describe the standalone Python-based plotting package we have been developing and using for almost a decade now.

It is significantly faster than the compiled C++ CASA tool and has many useful features not readily found in any other package: multiple data sets can be visualised at the same time, it facilitates powerful, human oriented, data selection commands, has built-in help w/ examples, supports animating of plots and fine-grained control over how to organise the plots to name but a few.

If anything, this use-case illustrates how useful it is to enable access to a facility's data from different languages.