Home

CASA Recipes for MeerKAT

The obvious first step is to get access to MeerKAT data via the MeerKAT archive, following the steps summarised on the repository entry page. It is assumed the user has some familiarity with the archive user manual.

In general, if no search criteria is specified all data available to the user will be listed. This include publicly available engineering and commissioning observation data, as well as science proposal observations.
Note: The biggest difference is that engineering and commissioning observation data are generally publicly available, while access to science observations are under restrictions as documented in the MeerKAT data access policy.

Important terminology that will pop up:

• The Observer Proposal ID is assigned when an observation proposal gets submitted. It becomes the primary reference for all observations associated with the observations related to the proposal.
  The assignment of a proposal ID is mandatory, with two major differences: a proposal ID for submitted science observations are assigned following MeerKAT observation request policies. Science observation IDs can be identified by the SCI prefix.
  For engineering and commissioning observations, the proposal ID is assigned on an ad-hoc basis. These observations do not contain any relevant science data, but are useful for training and investigation of MeerKAT data and performance.

• The second import ID tag is the Schedule Block ID. This ID is automatically assigned by the telescope per observation on execution. It distinguish the various observations performed, and allows easy search for newer observations in larger projects.

If neither the proposal ID or the relevant observation ID is specified, all files available are listed.

CASA measurement data set from MeerKAT MVF data files

Some example files to work through using the notebooks to get more familiar with MeerKAT data.

Using the interface provided or obtaining tokens obtained from the archive to use the command line tools to convert MVF files to CASA measurement sets

small data files for ....

example larger files for ....