Overview of programs

AOFlagger provides several programs. The rfigui program makes it possible to perform a “baseline by baseline” analysis of measurement sets (and other supported formats). When analyzing data from a telescope for the first time, it is recommended to first analyze the data with the rfigui, and use it to test and tweak flagging strategies, or if necessary to use it to design your own.

The aoflagger program runs strategies in a non-interactive, automated fashion. It is a command line program that, unlike rfigui, does not require a graphical terminal. It applies a flagging strategy to a dataset, and is optimized to run as fast as possible. aoflagger is therefore typically used to flag datasets “in production”, once a good flagging strategy has been found with the rfigui.

After flagging, aoqplot can be used to inspect the results.

If the strategy works well for a number of observations, it might be desirable to integrate the flagging into an observational pipeline. This could involve calling aoflagger during the processing, but sometimes it might be desirable to have a tighter coupling, e.g. to keep data in memory. For this, the C++ interface or Python interface can be used. Another reason to use the API is to run a flagging strategy on a dataset with a format that is not natively supported by aoflagger, e.g. a numpy array.