Australia Telescope National Facility

Using the ATOA pipeline

Introduction

The Australia Telescope Online Archive (ATOA) Pipeline is designed for producing 'quick and dirty' images of data in the archive. This allows you to get some idea of the data that is available, without having to download and fully reduce it yourself. Currently it can only reduce single pointing continuum data, but will be extending to include spectral line data and possibly other modes.

The ATOA consists of over 1.5 terabytes of observation data (approximately 50,000 RPFITS files) which has been collected from the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) over the last 15 years. More information about the archive is available here.

The pipeline and the archive have been developed as part of the ATNF contribution to the Australian Virtual Observatory. Each stage of the pipeline is available as a web service, and hence it can be reconfigured to suit the needs of various end users. More information about ATNF Virtual Observatory projects is available here.

Running the pipeline

The current version of the pipeline is fully automatic. This means once you have selected the data you wish to reduce, all you have to do is wait for the results. Any results or error messages will be returned to the screen, so it is important you don't press 'STOP' or 'RELOAD' on your browser, as this will interupt the process.

1. Query: Enter query parameters on the ATOA website and click the Find button. This will return a list of matching files from the archive.
2. Select: Select the files you are interested in reducing and click the Reduce button.
3. Reduce: The reduction process will now start, and feedback and errors will be displayed on the screen. You may need to scroll down to see the latest updates as the pipeline runs. When it is completed the resulting images (and some plots of the data) will be available for download.
4. Results: Download the FITS files (or plots) by clicking on the links displayed and saving them to your machine.

If you encounter any problems running the pipeline, please see the Troubleshooting Guide and then contact Tara Murphy.

Further Information

For more information on what happens during the pipeline processing, and how to interpret the results, you can look at

• What happens when the pipeline runs?
• Interpreting the pipeline results
• Can I access data in the proprietary period?
• More information about the archive

or follow the links below.