Quickstart¶

P-AIRCARS is distributed on PyPI. To use it, install it in isolated conda environment. If conda is not installed in your system, see Install Conda: Mamba for Conda installation instructions.

Set some environment variable to isolate conda environment from local and system packages:
```
export PYTHONNOUSERSITE=1
unset PYTHONPATH
```

Create conda environment with python 3.10 with compaitable C/C++ libraries

conda create -n paircars_env python=3.10 gcc_linux-64=14 gxx_linux-64=14 gfortran_linux-64=14 cmake pkg-config pip

conda activate paircars_env

Note

We suggest using Mamba for fast conda installtion and environment creation.

Install P-AIRCARS in conda environment
```
pip install paircars
```
Initiate necessary post-installation setup for metadata
```
init-paircars-setup --init
```
Note

By default, the necessary data will be saved in home directory and requires about 20 GB of disk space. We suggest using any other location with larger disk space and specify that by --datadir </full/path/to/paircars_datadir> in the above command.
Before running the pipeline, setup your data as following:
- Create a <target_datadir> and put all coarse channel measurement sets of solar scan of a single observation ID (OBSID) inside it.
- Create a <cal_datadir> and put all coarse channel measurement sets for calibrator observation of a single OBSID inside it.

Run P-AIRCARS pipeline

run-mwa-paircars <full path of target measurement set directory> --cal_datadir <full path of calibrator measurement set directory> --workdir <full path of work directory> --outdir <full path of output products directory>

Note

Always provide the entire directory path. Short path or only directory name may cause errors. Keep target measurement sets for a single OBSID and calibrator measurement sets for a single OBSID must be kept in seperate directories. If calibrator is not present, do not provide these information.

That’s all. You started P-AIRCARS pipeline for analysing your MWA solar observation 🎉. Read the Directory Structure and Data Products section to understand how to find final images.

To see all running P-AIRCARS jobs
```
show-paircars-status --show
```
If P-AIRCARS is running in local machine, view local log of any job using the <jobid>:
```
run-mwa-mwalogger --jobid <jobid>
```

Note

If you are running P-AIRCARS is cluster environment, first checkout HPC Settings in the document for viewing P-AIRCARS log remotely using prefect dashboard.

Output products will be saved in : <path of output products directory>.