niter, gain, cutoff Clean a residual dirty map with the dirty beam. EXAMPLE - (there is a more general example later in this help topic) ------- 0>clean 100,0.05,0.0 Inverting map and beam Estimated beam: bmin=1.8350 mas, bmaj=6.1080 mas, bpa=27.4 degrees Clean: niter=100 gain=0.05 cutoff=0 Component: 050 - total flux cleaned = 3.218951 Jy Component: 100 - total flux cleaned = 4.508268 Jy Total flux subtracted in 100 components = 4.508268 Jy Clean residual min=-0.184183 max=0.394841 Jy/beam Clean residual mean=0.024779 rms=0.092559 Jy/beam 0> All but the first line are responses from 'invert' and 'clean'. PARAMETERS ---------- niter - The Maximum number of CLEAN iterations to be attempted. If this is -ve then CLEANing will stop on the component before the first negative component. gain - The CLEAN loop gain (normally 0 -> 1). This sets the fraction of the peak (absolute) residual that is subtracted on each CLEAN iteration. The choice of a gain is a trade-off between the ideal (as small as possible) and the speed at which the map is reduced to the noise. It is common to start with a few iterations at high clean gain - say 0.1 - to clean away any bright point-like features such as a Galaxy core, and then to reduce it to clean the lower surface brightness extended structures. cutoff - Cleaning will stop if the maximum absolute residual falls to this value or lower (Jy). This may be used to prevent CLEAN from cleaning below the flux level at which (due to artifacts or noise) structures in the residuals can be believed. 'clean' remembers the parameters that were given to it the previous time it was invoked. Any omitted arguments will retain these values. WINDOWS ------- In addition to the above explicit command line parameters, CLEAN can be supplied with a list of rectangular windows, such that CLEAN components are only taken from within these windows. If no windows are supplied then CLEAN will use the whole map. Clean windows can be set directly via the 'mapwin' command or set with the cursor in the 'mapplot' command. The latter is the easiest to use. The registration between map pixels and clean window edges is such that all pixels who's centers lie inside the windows are used. Where the window is so thin as to not enclose any pixel centers, the pixels with the nearest centers are used. Windows may be set interactively with the cursor (see help on the 'mapplot' command). CONTEXT ------- Clean takes the residual dirty map from the previous clean and iteratively subtracts the dirty beam pattern convolved with the loop-gain times the brightest residual pixel. The end result is a new residual dirty map and a set of delta-function model components representing the flux subtracted from the selected pixels. Errors in the gains and phases at individual telescopes set the level down to which it is safe to CLEAN. To enable further CLEANing it is necessary to follow CLEAN by self-calibration, which compares the observed visibilities to the CLEAN model to determines self-consistent solutions to the telescope based gain and phase errors. Having done this it should be possible to CLEAN to a lower residual flux than before. A typical mapping sequence is: 0> observe myfile.uvf (Read the FITS UV-data file) 0> vplot (edit the visibilities to remove bad points) 0> mapsize 256,0.5 (set the map grid and cell-size) 0> mapplot (Display the dirty map and set CLEAN windows) 0> clean -100,0.1,0.2 (Clean up to 100 components at a gain of 0.2, stopping before the first negative component or when the peak residual is less than 0.1 Jy) 0> selfcal (Apply phase-only self-cal) 0> mapplot (Display corrected residuals and change the clean windows if necessary) 0> clean 100,0.05,0.05 (Use a lower clean gain and allow negatives, while cleaning down to a lower residual flux) 0> selfcal true,true,900 (Amplitude+phase self-cal) 0> vplot (Edit discrepant points - compare with model) 0> mapplot 0> clean etc.. until the residual flux won't further decrease or the self-cal fit starts to diverge. 0> mapplot cln (Look at the clean map) 0> save mynewfile (Save the UV data, the map, the model, the clean windows and the difmap parameters) 0> exit (Finished) SIDE EFFECTS ------------ If the beam and/or residual map need to be re-calculated following data editing, re-weighting etc.. then 'clean' will call 'invert'. LIMITATIONS ----------- Clean only cleans the inner half of the actual map array that is allocated. (mapplot only displays this area when plotting the map). Thus 'mapsize 256,0.5' will result in a map area 128x128 pixels wide. RELATED COMMANDS ---------------- selfcal - Uses the clean model in self-calibration. gscal - Uses the clean model and self-calibration to find overall gain corrections for each telescope. invert - Converts residual UV data to the residual dirty map. restore - Generate the clean map. vplot - Interactive display and editing of visibilities. mapplot - Display residual or clean map, or dirty beam.