SolarKAT: Solar imaging pipeline for MeerKAT

SolarKAT mitigates solar interference in MeerKAT data and recovers the visibilities rather than discarding them; this solar imaging pipeline takes 1GC calibrated data in Measurement Set format as input. Written in Python, the pipeline employs solar tracking, subtraction, and peeling techniques to enhance data quality by significantly reducing solar radio interference. This is achieved while preserving the flux measurements in the main field. SolarKAT is versatile and can be applied to general radio astronomy observations and solar radio astronomy; additionally, generated solar images can be used for weather forecasting. SolarKAT is deployed in Stimela (ascl:2305.007). It is based on existing radio astronomy software, including CASA (ascl:1107.013), breizorro (ascl:2305.009), WSclean (ascl:1408.023), Quartical (ascl:2305.006), and Astropy (ascl:1304.002).