v1.2.1

This release has a significant refactoring of the code to make it more readable and modular. There are no functionality changes with respect to #v1.2.0, moving of code to different places.

v1.2.0

This release enables co-calibration of adjacent target fields that could not be self-calibrated on their own by applying calibration solutions from a neighboring field.

v1.1.0

This release includes numerous bugfixes with respect to v1.0.0 that have been uncovered during the first year of operations with automated self-calibration with ALMA and the VLA. Furthermore, there is a substantial update to better support long-baseline observations that are more likely to have low S/N solutions at the longest baselines and ALMA mosaics which goes beyond the capabilities currently offered by the operational pipelines.

Auto Selfcal Version 1.0

Following many substantial bug fixes and improvements we're pleased to release a first version of auto_selfcal. This will operate on single-pointing ALMA and VLA data.

Major improvements:
-Support for ALMA spectral scan data
-Fixes to support spectral window IDs that change between MSes desired for self-calibration
-Fixes to the sensitivity calculation
-Improvements to auto-masking thresholding to avoid over-masking
-Use of wproject gridder for VLA L and S-bands
-Fixes for cont.dat file handing
-uvcontsub script generation supports old and new uvcontsub inputs
-improved metadata handling
-full tclean run for post-solint images
-amplitude selfcal enabled (can be disabled with a variable setting)
-Dynamic switching to nterms=2 imaging for data with fractional bandwidth < 0.1 based on S/N.

The self-calibration routines within the ALMA and VLA imaging pipelines in CASA 6.5.4-9-pipeline-2023.1.0.124 closely match the features in this release.

Final phase-only release

This release incorporates a number of new features to enhance selfcal reliability and optimization.

• Several fall backs are implemented for the inf_EB pre-applied gaintable, combine_spw, spwmapping, and no fallbacks
• Option to not do inf_EB pre-apply is removed
• gaintable filenames are now also sanitized to ensure renaming in the inf_EB stage doesn't fail
• if any target has a S/N > 500 at the start of selfcal or at any time during selfcal, nterms is increased to 2
• If using a cont.dat file, commands to perform uvcontsub with the same line emitting regions excluded are written to a script
• Field table names are now cross referenced with fields from listobs to ensure long field names do not get garbled as they sometimes can be with listobs
• MPI environment of CASA will be detected, if started with mpicasa parallel defaults to True, if not parallel defaults to False
• Tested with CASA version up to 6.5.0

Initial_auto_selfcal release

This release of auto_selfcal is relatively stable for both ALMA and the VLA. This version does not use pre-applied gaintables and always uses combine='spw'. This code should operate safely on most data.