cubevis - visualization tools for CASA images

cubevis is a visualization toolkit for radio astronomy image and visibility data, built on Bokeh for the front-end and CASA for the processing backend. Python and CASA drive image/data access while a generated JavaScript interface provides an interactive control front-end, usable from JupyterLab, Google Colab, or plain Python scripts.

cubevis currently provides two applications:

• Interactive Clean (iclean) - released. Visually observe and control CASA's image reconstruction (tclean/deconvolve). See Interactive Clean below.
• Visibility Plotter (visplot) - in development. Interactive visibility-domain plotting supporting both legacy CASA Measurement Sets (MSv2) and the newer AstroVIPER Measurement Set v4 format, via xarray-ms. visplot has no stable end-user API yet; it is not ready for general use.

This is a beta-release quality package.

Installation

cubevis uses optional extras so that installing it doesn't pull in more than a given application needs. The extras you want depend on which application you're using:

# Interactive Clean (released)
pip install cubevis[iclean]

# Visibility Plotter (in development - no stable API yet)
pip install cubevis[visplot]

# add Jupyter/anywidget support for either, if working in a notebook
pip install cubevis[iclean,notebook]

iclean depends on CASA6's casatasks. visplot depends on xarray-ms / arcae for both its MSv2 and MSv4 backends, so it does not require casatasks even when working with legacy Measurement Sets.

iclean and visplot are convenience aliases for the underlying casa6 and xarray extras, respectively; those backend-named extras are also available directly for anyone assembling a custom environment. Installing casa6 and xarray together in the same plain pip environment is not currently supported, since the two backends can require mutually incompatible native library versions (notably libprotobuf) that pip has no mechanism to reconcile - use a pixi or conda environment for combined installs.

Interactive Clean

Interactive clean is the primary application provided by this package. It allows for visualizally observing and controlling the image reconstruction performed by CASA. The primary CASA tasks used to perform the image reconstruction are tclean and deconvolve.

Usage

This example provide a summary of how to use interactive clean from Python:

from cubevis import iclean

iclean( vis='refim_twopoints_twochan.ms', imagename='test',
        imsize=100, cell='8.0arcsec',
        phasecenter="J2000 19:59:28.500 +40.44.01.50",
        outlierfile='test_outlier.txt',
        niter=50, cycleniter=10, deconvolver='hogbom',
        specmode='mfs', spw='0:0' )

For this sample, the test measurement set is available, while the outlierfile would look something like:

imagename=try_multifield_1
imsize=[80,80]
cell=[8.0arcsec,8.0arcsec]
phasecenter=J2000 19:58:41.095 +40.56.01.043

Visibility Plotter

visplot is under active development and does not yet have a stable end-user API - it isn't ready for general use, and this README will be updated with usage instructions once one is available.