nenucal

nenucal is a calibration and data-management toolkit for NenuFAR radio observations. 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:

• a data management tool (nenudata) to organise observations, spectral windows, and node layout across the cluster, and to move data between processing stages;

• a calibration pipeline (calpipe), running on top of DP3 and driven by TOML configuration files;

• a set of utilities to handle the supporting data products — gain solution tables (soltool), sky models (modeltool), flagging (flagtool), MeasurementSets (mstool), and imaging (imgpipe).

nenucal is designed to be composed into full end-to-end pipelines rather than run on its own. For the Cosmic Dawn project it is used in two such pipelines, both general enough to be reused by any NenuFAR project:

• nenuprepipe — pre-processing of raw NenuFAR data (L1) into quality-checked MeasurementSets ready for calibration (L2);

• nenuflow — the direction-dependent calibration pipeline.

Contents

• Installation
  • Installing nenucal
  • Requirements
• Calibration pipeline
  • Basic usage
  • How it works
  • The sky model
  • With a data-handler
  • Available tasks
  • Typical workflows
  • Global configuration
  • Task reference
• Sky model tools
  • build — fetch sky model from catalog
  • attenuate / deattentuate — apply and remove the NenuFAR beam
  • concatenate — merge multiple sky models
  • filter — filter a sky model by flux, patch, or elevation
  • cluster — group sources into calibration directions
  • inspect — inspect a grouped sky model
  • plot — visualise a sky model
  • set_patch_name — rename all patches to a single name
• MeasurementSet utilities
  • info — inspect a MeasurementSet
  • add / sub — column arithmetic
  • concat — concatenate MeasurementSets in time
  • extract_lst — extract an LST range
• Data management
  • Naming conventions — N1 and N2
• Gain solution tools
  • combine — merge per-spectral-window bandpass solutions
  • smooth — Gaussian smoothing in time and frequency
  • plot — waterfall plots per antenna
  • plot-spectra — bandpass amplitude spectra
  • plot-delay — delay spectrum per antenna
• Flagging tools
  • backup / restore / reset / copy — flag management
  • ssins — SSINS RFI flagger
  • delay_flagger — delay-space RFI flagging
  • vis_flagger — configurable visibility flagging pipeline
• Imaging
  • Use cases
  • Configuration file
  • Reference
• Changelog
  • Unreleased
  • 0.15 - 2026-06-27
  • 0.14 - 2026-06-24
  • 0.13 - 2026-06-24
  • 0.12 - 2026-06-24
  • 0.11 - 2026-06-19
  • 0.10 - 2025-11-27
  • 0.9 - 2025-10-27
  • 0.8 - 2025-06-12
  • 0.7.1 - 2024-07-22
  • 0.7 - 2024-07-10
  • 0.6.2 - 2024-07-09
  • 0.6.1 - 2024-07-09
  • 0.6 - 2024-07-09
  • 0.5 - 2023-04-28
  • 0.4 - 2023-02-12
  • 0.3 - 2022-12-19
  • 0.2.1 - 2022-10-19
  • 0.2 - 2022-07-24
  • 0.2 (RC1) - 2022-01-13
  • 0.2 (beta) - 2021-11-30
  • 0.1.11 - 2021-07-13
  • 0.1.10 - 2021-07-01
  • 0.1.9 - 2021-05-18
  • 0.1.8 - 2021-04-30
  • 0.1.7 - 2021-04-30