Version 3.2

This is the last version of prefactor based on the genericpipeline framework.

• several bugfixes and minor improvements
• added high-resolution models for increased compatibility if using data including long baselines
• added option to add back missing stations for the use with long-baseline data
• automated selection of a reference antenna

Further updates, improvements of prefactor will be released at the ASTRON gitlab page of prefactor: https://git.astron.nl/eosc/prefactor3-cwl

Version 3.1

Version 3.1 includes some improvements since the last version:

• added new high-resolution skymodels for processing HBA long baselines
• added automatic reference antenna search
• several bugfixes / small updates
• increased compatibility for LBA calibrator observations

Version 3.0

Version 3.0 introduces a new calibration scheme suitable for LBA and HBA data and is not compatible with previous versions.

New features and changes since the last release include:

• Major restructuring of the pipelines, needed to implement new calibration strategy and to add support for LBA and long-baseline data
• Many new options (e.g., for demixing)
• Improved documentation

Version 3.0 beta 1

Note: this is a beta release of version 3.0. Please report bugs on the issue tracker.

Version 3.0 introduces a new calibration scheme suitable for LBA and HBA data and is not compatible with previous versions.

New features and changes since the last release include:

• Major restructuring of the pipelines, needed to implement new calibration strategy and to add support for LBA and long-baseline data
• Many new options (e.g., for demixing)
• Improved documentation

This beta version has been tested to work with the following dependencies:

• losoto, commit: 6298e4897a9285957b25e7159bc6d94054a92bcd
• RMextract, commit: 4a857ebd7df2a6fc2181974fff3e7a8c9d067966
• LSMTool, v1.4
• DP3, commit: 599e33c39d592cf8f78f6830bab02fcf80b001ab
• AOFlagger, v2.14

Version 2.1

Note: this release is the last one to use the "old" version-2 calibration scheme (suitable for HBA data only). Future releases (version 3) will use a new scheme suitable for LBA and HBA data.

Note on dependencies: this release is not fully compatible with RMextract v0.3. If you have problems, please downgrade to RMextract v0.2 instead.

New features and changes since the last release include:

• Switch to DPPP for all calibration
• Switch to losoto's h5parm format for solution tables
• Support for WSClean versions >= 2.5
• Many bug fixes

Version 2.0.3.1

This release includes a fix for using TaQL for computing azimuth / elevation, rather than adding virtual columns. This fixes errors on some systems with older versions of casacore, which will report things like "column AZEL1 does not exist".

Version 2.0.3

Note: this release is the last one to use BBS for the calibrator calibration. Future releases will use DPPP for all calibration and Losoto for the processing of the solutions.

New features include:

• IDG support in initial-subtract pipelines
• averaging steps changed to time and frequency resolutions
• fast version of initial-subtract pipeline
• in the initial-subtract pipeline, rectangular images are made automatically

Version 2.0.2

Very minor release, with some bugfixes, a workaround for a bug in matplotlib / pyBDSM and so on.

Version 2.0.1

It includes mostly some bugfixes that were done since the release of version 2.0.

The other change is the addition of two scripts to the bin directory, see also: Helper Scripts

Version 2.0

First release of version 2.0.

New features include:

• applying Ionospheric RM corrections
• grouping of subbands by actual frequency
• speed and disk usage improvements by optimized usage of NDPPP
• (optional) wide-band cleaning in Initial-Subtract
• more diagnostic plots
• documentation moved to GitHib wiki: https://github.com/lofar-astron/prefactor/wiki
• automatic selection of calibrator skymodel
• automatic generation of TGSS skymodel

Other changes:

• the Pre-Facet-Cal pipeline is split into two files, one for the calibrator part and one for the target part
• the scripts were sorted into two directories:
  • bin for those that are intended to be (also) directly called by the user
  • scripts for those that are intended to be only called by the pipeline

While we did some testing, there may still be bugs lurking in the code. Please open an issue if you happen to find one.

P.S. The required version of WSClean for Initial-Subtract-Deep is the not-yet-released version 2.0.