General notes on CASA containers¶
This page contains a compilation of useful notes, etc, on various CASA containers.
Astroquery / astropy¶
The astroquery tool is presently only installed on newer CASA containers (6.4.4-6.6.3). To use astroquery from an appropriate CASA container, type the following to initiate an astroquery-compatible version of python:
/opt/casa/bin/python3
As per the astroquery documentation, the tool can then be used on the command line within the python environment. For example, the following sequence of commands
from astroquery.simbad import Simbad
result_table = Simbad.query_object("m1")
result_table.pprint()
yield a one-line table listing some basic information about M1.
Analysis Utilities¶
The analysisUtils package package is pre-installed on every CASA container, and is ready to use. You may need to type
import analysisUtils as au
to load it.
Firefox¶
The Firefox web-browser, needed for CASA commands where you are interacting with the weblogs, should available for CASA versions 6.1.0 to 6.4.3. Error messages will pop up in your terminal window, but minimal testing suggests that it is sufficiently functional.
UVMultiFit¶
The UVMultiFit package is presently installed and working for all CASA 5.X versions except 5.8. To load the UVMultiFit package, initiate casa and then type
from NordicARC import uvmultifit as uvm
Known Container Bugs¶
1) CASA versions 6.5.0 to 6.5.2 initially launch with some display errors in the logger window. Exiting casa (but not the container) and re-starting casa fixes the issue, i.e.,
casa
exit
casa
2) Running multi-thread pipeline scripts (MPI CASA) may generate error messages, as described here under the 'Running pipeline in non-interactive mode' section. A CANFAR ALMA user reports success initiating MPI CASA in a Desktop container as follows:
xvfb-run -a mpicasa casa —nologger —nogui -agg -c casa_script.py
ALMA/CASA Adjacent Containers : Galario¶
The UV data analysis package galario is available under the radio-submm menu. Note that this container has had minimal testing, and the uvplot package commands in the quickstart.py script are not presently working, although all preceeding commands in the quickstart.py script do work.
ALMA/CASA Adjacent Containers : Starlink¶
The JCMT's Starlink package is available under the radio-submm menu, including image analysis tools and the gaia image viewer. Note that the starlink-pywrapper add-on package is presently not working. Minimal testing has been done on the Starlink container.