ALMA 2020 Virtual Workshop for New Postgraduate Students
The UK ARC Node hosted its first virtual ALMA workshop during a series of half-days from the 9th to the 13th of November. This workshop covered the same topics that are featured in typical introductory ALMA workshops, including introductions to ALMA and interferometry, hands-on work with the Observing Tool and the ALMA Science Archive, and calibration and imaging in CASA. The difference was that this workshop was conducted entirely virtually, which presented some new challenges in terms of interactions with the participants, particularly in terms of troubleshooting problems. However, by the end, the participants succeeded in making their own ALMA images.
One of the advantages of holding a virtual workshop like this is that people can join regardless of their locations. Participants came from across the UK as well as from several other countries (even though the workshop was aimed at UK students). Demand for the workshop was very high, but for practical reasons, registration was capped at 24 people.
A few people who could not join the November workshop expressed an interest in a potential workshop in the future, and the UK ARC Node is currently gauging interest in another workshop in February or March 2021. Please see the next article for more details.
ALMA Early 2021 Virtual Workshop
By popular demand, the UK ARC Node is planning to offer a new ALMA Virtual Workshop in the Spring of 2021. This workshop, aimed at new ALMA users, will be a comprehensive overview of ALMA. The workshop will include an introduction to the observatory, a review of interferometry, a demonstration of using the Observing Tool for proposal preparation, an overview of using the ALMA Archive, and hands-on work with calibrating and imaging ALMA data.
People who are potentially interested in this workshop can express their interest as well as indicate their preferred dates for the workshop in the pre-registration poll. The workshop will be scheduled for either February or March 2021; dates will be set on the 15th of January.
I-TRAIN, ALMA training sessions organised by the European ARC Network
The European ARC Network is initiating I-TRAIN a regular series of Interactive Training in Reduction and Analysis of INterferometric data. The sessions will cover a wide range of topics of interest for the ALMA user community with the aim to help users gain expertise in working with interferometric data. The duration of each training session will be about one hour, including a live demo and interactive Q&A. Information on the I-TRAIN sessions and legacy materials will be available in the Science Portal.
Imaging with the ALMA Pipeline
December 4, 2020, 11:00 CET
Host: Nordic ARC Node
Zoom Link
This session describe how to run the ALMA Science Pipeline for your own scientific purposes. We will guide you on how to tweak different parameters of the pipeline tasks to produce your own cleaned data cubes from publicly available ALMA data. This will allow you to obtain products that are tailored to the specific requirements of your science projects.
ALMA Science Archive update and ARI-L
December 15, 2020, 11:00 CET
Google link
The second training session will present some recently added functionality of the ALMA Science Archive like access to individual files, the CARTA remote visualisation and the new ALMA VO services. An overview over the European ALMA development project ARI-L will follow. ARI-L has already delivered over 74000 science FITS files to the ALMA Science Archive completing the existing ALMA products for Cycles 2-4.
UVMultiFit
January 15, 2021, 11:00 CET
Host: Nordic ARC Node
Zoom link UVMultiFit is a versatile library for fitting models directly to visibility data. Visibility fitting can be a powerful method to analyse interferometric data and extract source information without the need to process image deconvolution.
Full details and connection information on these and future I-TRAIN events will be posted on the I-TRAIN webpage.