Common Astronomy Software Applications

CASA, the Common Astronomy Software Applications, is the primary data processing software for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA), and is often used also for other radio telescopes.

6.4.4 Release

CASA 6.4.4 can now be downloaded for general use. CASA 6.4.4 is available either as a downloadable tar-file, or through pip-wheel installation, which gives flexibility to integrate CASA into a customized Python environment.

Highlights:

  • tclean: a new experimental deconvolution algorithm “Adaptive Scale Pixel” has been added to tclean.

  • tclean: new/unknown observatory names can now trigger the generation of Airy disk primary beams.

  • plotms: improvements for changing the phasecenter on-the-fly, which now relies on absolute (rather than relative) position.

  • plotms: colorization now assigns a color for each point based on unique values in a list, to ensure that the colors vary (e.g., for spw in ALMA spectral scans)

  • ft: The componentlist tool and task ft now support models with spectral curvature.

  • fft: the tool method ia.fft() now handles brightness units properly.

  • ALMA array configuration files for Cycle-9 were added to the CASA data repository.

  • almahelpers.py was removed from the almatasks package, because its functions are duplicates of those that can be found in casarecipes.

For more details on these and other new features, see the CASA 6.4.4 Release Notes.

CASA is developed by an international consortium of scientists based at the National Radio Astronomical Observatory (NRAO), the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA), CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science (CSIRO/CASS), and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON), under the guidance of NRAO.