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22-07-2020
Release of AOFlagger 3.0
| Submitter: | André Offringa |
| Description: | This Tuesday (21 July 2020), version 3.0 of AOFlagger was released. AOFlagger is a software package that is used to detect radio-frequency interference (RFI) in radio observations. It was written for use with the LOFAR telescope, but had a bigger impact: by now, AOFlagger is used by many radio astronomers around the world to remove RFI in their observations, and has been applied to all the well-known telescopes. Because RFI detection has to be done on high-resolution data, it is a time-critical task. At the same time, it is necessary to allow flexibility in the configuration of the detection, to make it possible to vary the configuration based on for example baseline distance, time resolution or observing frequency. Flexibility and high-performance are two requirements that often conflict with each other. Whereas version 2 of AOFlagger had very limited flexibility, in AOFlagger 3 the detection strategies are so-called Lua scripts. Lua is a fast and simple scripting language that is exceptionally suitable for embedding, which is exactly what is required for AOFlagger. "World of Warcraft" is a well-known example where Lua is also used. By using Lua, AOFlagger 3.0 is now flexible enough to fully support Apertif data, and is ready for processing SKA data. At the same time, flagging LOFAR data has become slightly faster. |
| Copyright: | CC, by André Offringa |
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