Refactor reading routines
iancze opened this issue · 1 comments
Is your feature request related to a problem or opportunity? Please describe.
We want to open up visread and the CASA internals to the user as much as possible, so that they can inspect the visibilities provided by ALMA and CASA to immediately spot errors before they get to later analysis.
Describe the solution you'd like
I think one way to achieve this is by writing lots of self-contained reading/analysis scripts based off of casatools like table and ms, and then writing lots of routines demonstrating how to use them.
Even better is if we directly show the user how to interact with the data with the casatools first, and then provide the wrapped routines. Ultimately, a tutorial of an API will be a lot more useful than a blackbox read routine.
Questions to address
We want the user to be able to discover things like
- multiple spectral windows
- multiple polarizations
- flagged visibilities
- autocorrelation visibilities
- tclean model column
- incorrectly scaled weights (using tclean)
- averaging polarizations
- S/N of visibilities
For spectral line datasets
- noise covariance for binned/unbinned