IMAGER in short

IMAGER is an interferometric imaging package in the GILDAS software, tailored for usage simplicity and efficiency for multi-spectral data sets.

The main goals of IMAGER are

1. to offer a proper implementation of imaging in case of wide relative bandwidth, where the natural angular resolution changes with frequency.
2. to implement a simple and efficient scheme to process Mosaics, including short spacings from single dish data
3. to take advantage of improved capabilities of NOEMA and ALMA, by offering new tools like self-calibration or wide bandwidth analysis.
4. to simplify user interfaces, by providing sensible defaults.
5. to minimize image sizes
6. to minimize processing time by using parallel programming as much as possible and reducing Input/Output to the strict minimum.

IMAGER was developed and optimized to minimize Input/Output that are the bottleneck of current computers. Therefore, IMAGER works mostly on internal buffers and avoids as much as possible saving data to intermediate files. File saving is done ultimately once the data analysis process is complete, which offers an optimum use of the disk bandwidth.

IMAGER also includes advanced display and image analysis tools, such as simple overlaying of different data cubes, etc...