NenuCAL CD

nenucal is a calibration and data-management toolkit for NenuFAR radio observations. It takes raw or pre-processed NenuFAR MeasurementSets and produces calibrated visibilities ready for imaging or power-spectrum analysis. It was developed for the Cosmic Dawn project but is not specific to it — it can be used for any NenuFAR imaging observation.

At its core it provides three things, each installed as a command-line tool:

• a data management tool (nenudata) to organise observations, spectral windows, and node layout, and to move data between processing stages;
• a calibration pipeline (calpipe), built on DP3 and driven by TOML configuration files;
• a set of utilities for the supporting data products: gain solutions (soltool), sky models (modeltool), flagging (flagtool), MeasurementSets (mstool), and imaging (imgpipe).

Full documentation: https://nenucal-cd.readthedocs.io

Installation

$ pip install nenucal

Requires Python ≥ 3.10; the Python dependencies are installed automatically. The source repository is named nenucal-cd, while the published Python distribution and import package are both named nenucal.

Some functionality also relies on external tools that must be installed separately:

• DP3 — calibration and visibility processing
• AOFlagger — RFI flagging
• WSClean — imaging

Usage

See the documentation for guides on the calibration pipeline, sky-model building, flagging, gain-solution handling, and data management.

nenucal is designed to be composed into full pipelines. For the Cosmic Dawn project it was used to build two general, reusable pipelines:

• nenuprepipe — raw-data pre-processing into calibration-ready MeasurementSets;
• nenuflow — the end-to-end calibration pipeline.

Contact

Do not hesitate to file an issue or contact me if you encounter a problem with this package.