Daily Image
04-02-2025
Team Rapthor proudly presents: LINC v5.0
| Submitter: | Marcel Loose |
| Description: | Last Tuesday, version 5.0 of the LINC pipeline was released. This release is a major milestone for Team Rapthor. LINC is the LOFAR Initial Calibration pipeline. It is used by many astronomers to perform direction-independent calibration, the first post-processing operation on LOFAR data after the data have left the Central Processor (CEP). LINC corrects for various instrumental and ionospheric effects in both LOFAR HBA and LOFAR LBA observations. It does not produce science-ready data, but its output is crucial for direction-dependent calibration pipelines, like Rapthor. LINC started as a re-implementation of the Prefactor pipeline, using the Common Workflow Language (CWL) to describe the workflow. Since the previous release, many new features have been added and several improvements have been made. One important new feature is its LBA processing capability. LINC was extended with essential features from LiLF, the pipeline that was used to produce DR1 of the LOFAR LBA Sky Survey (LoLSS), and is now considered to be on par with that pipeline. The new release also sports a new self-calibration mode for HBA observations. It has better control over the resources it uses, and its performance was improved. New flagging strategies for AOFlagger were implemented. Options were added to skip A-Team clipping, and to plot the structure function. And many, many more small enhancements were made. Lastly, the CI/CD pipeline that builds, tests, packages, and deploys the LINC software was completely rewritten. Making a release is now almost as easy as pressing a button, which paves the way for releasing more frequently. Many thanks go to Alexander Drabent, who has been contributing tirelessly to most of the LINC pipeline during the past few years. |
| Copyright: | Team Rapthor, ASTRON |
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