Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Watch out for the STOKES parameter when plotting (even if you don't care about polarization)

When using the many plotting/flagging programs in AIPS, make sure to check the value of the STOKES parameter before plotting (try help stokes to see the options and select the one appropriate for that data set). Different tasks have different STOKES defaults, so sometimes displaying data in one program results in a totally different plot than in another program because one is including some polarizations the other is not. This particularly can be a problem if you have cross-polarization values you don't care about (yet).



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