By / par Bryan Gaensler (U. Toronto)
(Cassiopeia – Autumn / l’automne 2021)
The Canadian Initiative for Radio Astronomy Data Analysis (CIRADA) is producing science-ready public data products for large surveys being conducted with three telescopes: the Very Large Array (VLA), the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), and the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME). These products (e.g., images, cubes, time series spectra, catalogues, databases, alerts, pipeline algorithms, and software tools) utilize Canadian Advanced Network for Astronomical Research (CANFAR) services and are searchable and usable through the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC). CIRADA also serves as a pilot project for Canada’s planned Square Kilometre Array Regional Centre.
We are pleased to announce an updated portfolio of products as follows:
- A “Quicklook Catalogue” of 1.7 million radio sources from the first epoch of the VLA Sky Survey (VLASS), which now includes a second version that contains data on sidelobe probabilities, the software pipelines that were used to generate the catalogues, and detailed user manuals.
- pyink, developed in collaboration with Dr. Tim Galvin, a tool that simplifies the preprocessing and analysis that is required to train a self-organizing map (SOM) using PINK. A SOM identifies common morphologies in a collection of images, which can be used to (i) classify image morphologies, (ii) group separate components into sources, (iii) reject spurious sources, (iv) save on processing time for other machine learning models. A tutorial and cookbook are provided to help train your own SOM.
- An Image Cutout Provider that allows astronomers to quickly visualize data from multiple surveys (VLASS Quicklook, GLEAM, FIRST, NVSS, WISE, PanSTARRS, SDSS I-II) at a given position in the sky and to download the data for further analysis.
- A Rotation Measure (RM) Cutout Provider that provides cutouts for the mean and standard deviation of the reconstructed Faraday sky as calculated by Hutschenreuter et al.
- The RM-Tools software package for radio polarimetry analysis, including 1D and 3D RM synthesis, RM-clean and QU fitting on polarized radio spectra.
- Hydra: A source finder comparison and analysis tool that can be used to compare multiple source-finding algorithms on radio continuum data, along with examples and instructions.
- A mock-cube generator suite for observations of galaxies in 21cm HI, which can be used to generate realistic data cubes for a single axisymmetric galaxy model, or for a suite of axisymmetric models generated from standard scaling relations.
Upcoming releases include:
- an alpha version of the VLASS Quicklook Transient Marshal (Q4 2021)
- a third version of the VLASS Quicklook component catalogue, which will include data on double sources that have been picked out by Yjan Gordon’s novel DragonHunter software pipeline (end of 2021)
Currently we are in discussions with external science partners to integrate Rapid ASKAP Continuum Survey (RACS) catalogues and images into our services. We are also in discussion to integrate the WALLABY pilot field source detections to accompany our planned release of kinematic models in Q2 2022. We are continuing our collaboration with the Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) and with the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) to enable the use of the Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (CARTA) for viewing image data and tabular catalogues directly through our portal. Other 12- to 15-month plans include the release of additional data products such as a VLASS Quicklook Transients catalogue, VLASS single epoch continuum catalogues, a CHIME slow pulsar catalogue, POSSUM polarization products, and a new standard for Faraday rotation catalogues.