Miriad

Introduction

Miriad is the radio-astronomy data reduction package used by the ATNF. We are running the 64bit Linux version. Miriad is a radio interferometry data reduction package of particular interest to users of the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA). It can be used for the reduction of continuum and spectral line observations from beginning to end, starting with the loading of the data (either FITS, the ATNF RPFITS or old BIMA formats) through to image synthesis, analysis and display with publication quality graphics. In particular Miriad supports a number of niche areas including calibration and analysis of polarimetric data from the ATCA, multi-frequency synthesis imaging, mosaicing, ATCA pulsar bin mode, and specialized spectral line observations (e.g. Zeeman).

Documentation

The home page is http://www.atnf.csiro.au/computing/software/miriad/. More information is available in the userguide downloadable from here.

Initialisation

For csh/tcsh:

source /usr/local/miriad/MIRRC
setenv PATH ${MIRBIN}:${PATH}
rehash
miriad

for sh/bash:

 . /usr/local/miriad/MIRRC.sh
export PATH=${MIRBIN}:${PATH}
miriad

Version

To find out which version of miriad is installed, do this:

cat /usr/local/miriad/VERSION

Currently we are running version 20180118.

Testing

Test the installation by running a few tasks from the miriad shell, for example atlod which will test the RPFITS library, and uvplt which will test PGPLOT, including X11.

Usage

See user manual.

Author, References and Acknowledgements

Please cite the following paper if you use Miriad in your work:

A retrospective view of Miriad, by Sault R.J., Teuben P.J., & Wright M.C.H., 1995. In Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IV, ed. R. Shaw, H.E. Payne, J.J.E. Hayes, ASP Conference Series, 77, 433-436.

Potential Problems

This version only runs on RedHat7/Centos7/SL7 versions of Linux.

Do not run IRAF in the same window as a Miriad instance, it will crash with a mysterious error due to a clash of environment variable names.

Rhys Morris

Last modified: Monday, 05 February 2018