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Paper: Difmap: An Interactive Program for Synthesis Imaging
Monograph: 6, Twenty Years of ADASS
Page: 447
Authors:
Abstract: Difmap is a stand-alone program used by the radio-astronomy community to produce images from radio interferometers. It reads and writes the standard UV FITS file format produced by packages such as AIPS, and provides convenient ways to inspect, edit, and self-calibrate visibility data while incrementally building up a model of the sky. It has proven to be a popular alternative to larger packages that do much moreā€”so part of this paper will focus on why this is so, and on whether the lessons learned could benefit future projects. Some time will also be spent describing the general structure of Difmap, particularly how being contained within a single-process is exploited to achieve speed, portability, and a degree of interactivity that is hard to match in larger systems.
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