Date: Mon, 10 Dec 2012 16:59:06 -0300
From: Juergen Ott 
To: casa-announce@nrao.edu, ecsv@aoc.nrao.edu, naasc@nrao.edu, Eric Villard , Dirk Petry 
Subject: [Casa-announce] {Disarmed} Release of CASA 4.0
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 Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to announce a new release of CASA (4.0.0). 

CASA, the Common Astronomy Software Applications (CASA) package is
being developed by NRAO, ESO, and NAOJ and is used for the offline
reduction and analysis of both ALMA and EVLA data.  CASA is fully scriptable.
Full support is provided for ALMA, VLA, and JVLA formats, but almost any data
that can be written in uvfits format can be imported and reduced in CASA
(for example, CARMA, SMA, ATCA).


Linux and MacOS distributions of CASA 4.0.0 are now available from the CASA webpage: 

http://casa.nrao.edu 

Please Follow the links to "Obtaining CASA".
We changed the supported OSs to include:

Linux (64bit): RedHat 5.7 & 5.8
Mac OS: 10.6 (Snow Leopard), 10.7 (Lion)

** Note: this is the last release to support Mac OS 10.6.  After the 10.6 release we will transition to support for Mac OS 10.7 (L


New features in CASA 4.0.0 include:

* tflagdata has been renamed flagdata (an alias of tflagdata has been preserved 
  for script compatability). The old flagdata no lo
* improved pclean with parallel spectral line imaging as well as continuum mode 
  ( mode='mfs';nterms=1) for single fields and mosai
* for large fractional bandwidths, clean will now use per-channel restoring beams; 
  the resulting cubes can be used in all data ana
* primary beam correction for Taylor-term nterms>1 continuum images is now available 
  in the new task widebandpbcor    
* plotms: Selections of data points can now be dumped into ASCII files
* scriptability and autosizing of point sizes in plotms    
* Support for calibration of linear polarization feeds 
* more flexible flagging modes in applycal with the new applymode parameter
* fluxscale outputs a spectral index than can be used as input for setjy 
* setjy now contains updated models for solar system objects ('Butler-JPL-Horizons 2012') and 
  new 'Perley-Butler 2013' flux standa
* wvrgcal is updated to version 1.2
* new task imsubimage to more easily create subsets of data cubes 
* new task makemask for handling of masks in images
* on-the-fly spectral velocity regridding in the viewer when multiple data cubes are selected 
* viewer: "blinking" images and moving through the image spectral planes are now separated 
  into two separate tapedecks
* viewer: FITS & CASA preload image summaries in Data Manager panel
* additional marker shapes for point-type regions
* Substantial improvements have been made to the spectral viewer, including:
 - The plane displayed in the image panel is now marked in and can be selected or scrolled 
   from the spectral viewer
 - The units on the y-axis can now be changed and when a single cube is loaded, multiple 
   x-axis labels can be shown at the same time (e.g. velocity and frequency)ocation,
   and the plot style (histogram/line) can now be customized and persist
 - Initial implementation of spectral line catalog overlays and interactive spectral 
   line identification.
 - Initial implementation of on-the-fly moment creation via the "Collapse" tool.
* single dish: OTF map calibration can now use the edge of the map as a reference as an 
  alternative to separate reference scan obs
* Added new calmodes, 'otf' and 'otfraster', in sdcal task
* sdplot: new plottype='grid' to plot spectra based on their sky position.
* Chebychev polynomial fitting in sdbaseline
* Rest Frequency Parameter available in sdbaseline, sdfit, sdflag, sdimaging, sdplot, 
  sdreduce, sdsave and sdstat.
* Sdflag: channel flagging by frequency or velocity available now.
* experimental parallelization of most visibility-related tasks (but excluding 
  those that produce new output MSs).
* binding of C++ code to python is now performed via swig 
  For a full list, see the release notes on casa.nrao.edu.

We encourage you to subscribe to either or both of the following
subscription lists:

*Casa-announce*    for announcement of new releases, workshops, etc.;
please subscribe at
http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/mailman/listinfo/casa-announce

*Casa-users*     for critical bugs and code updates;
please subscribe at
http://listmgr.cv.nrao.edu/mailman/listinfo/casa-users



If you have any questions, please consult the NRAO helpdesk: 

http://help.nrao.edu
or 
MailScanner has detected a possible fraud attempt from "alma-help.nrao.edu" claiming to be http://help.almascience.edu  for all AL

Regards,

 The CASA team