Preserving NEWSTAR

© CC-BY-4.0 Tammo Jan Dijkema

Newstar (short for The Netherlands East West Synthesis Telescope Array Reduction) is the software used for calibrating and imaging the data from the WSRT. It includes full redundancy and self calibration. A breakthrough in Newstar was the use of selfcal. With the algorithms in Newstar, it held the record of 500000:1 dynamic range for a long time.

Newstar development started in the 1980s. Most of Newstar was developed by Wim Brouw; its most prominent user was Ger de Bruyn. Among many other achievements, Newstar was used for reducing the WENSS survey. Historical treaties on Newstar appeared in "The Westerbork Observatory, Continuing Adventure in Radio Astronomy" (Raimond and Genee, eds., 1996), and will appear in the new Westerbork book (in preparation).

The source code of Newstar is now hosted on Github: https://github.com/lofar-astron/Newstar ; the original website, complemented with scans of some manuals, is now online at https://lofar-astron.github.io/Newstar .

The installation procedure is somewhat complicated to modern standards. Docker comes to the rescue: using a Docker image of Ubuntu 8.04 (2008, code name Intrepid Ibex), we were able to create a working installation of Newstar. Running this docker image requires installing Docker (which is available on Windows, macOS and Linux), and typing the command docker run -it tammojan/Newstar.

Using this technique, we were able to get Newstar running on the Windows 10 laptop of Wim Brouw without any problems.