Lost in Space (But Make It Data): Navigating Images with CARTA

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This is a basic tutorial on the CARTA image viewer CARTA webpage for the Italian community and users of the Italian ARC node. This tutorial walks you through the basic things to know to use CARTA for image management and scientific exploitation.

Contents

  1. What is CARTA? — Overview of CARTA
  2. How to access CARTA? — Choose the way to access CARTA
  3. Meeting the interface — Overview of the initial CARTA interface
  4. Layouts and preferences — Setting Layouts and preferences for widgets
  5. Image management — Image management: open, append, match, save, close
  6. How to define Regions — Defining, saving and restoring regions
  7. Statistics widget — Extracting values out of CARTA
  8. Guide on plotting Tools — Overlaying contours, vectors, and catalogues
  9. Basic Spectral analysis — Spectral line analysis, moments, and PV plots

Images used in this tutorial

This tutorial uses images extracted from the ALMA Science Archive from the ARI-L project (Massardi et al. 2021) for the following targets:

  • SDP9 projID: 2015.1.00415.S (PI. Wong) ALMA Band 6 data (see also Massardi et al. 2018)

CO(6-5): https://almascience.eso.org/dataPortal/member.uid___A001_X2de_X28.ari_l.SDP9_sci.spw0_268325MHz.12m.cube.I.pbcor.fits

continuum: https://almascience.eso.org/dataPortal/member.uid___A001_X2de_X28.ari_l.SDP9_sci.spw0_1_2_3_259998MHz.12m.cont.I.pbcor.fits

This tutorial also uses some images from the SHORES 2.1 GHz ATCA Survey for an AGN target (courtesy of the SHORES collaboration, see also Massardi et al. 2025, Behiri et al. 2026 and Galluzzi et al. in preparation)

Useful files can be downloaded from the drive https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/13hIK4j3OcXc_kJvO–uVNGkBeYkEL1V5?usp=sharing

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Italian ARC — Tutorial for the Italian community