Integrate ska-ost-array-config for up-to-date SKA telescope layouts and custom subarrays

[mpluess]

PREREQUISITE: Karabo upgrade to Python 3.10

PR #630 integrates all SKA-Low and -Mid AA layouts into Karabo for use with the OSKAR simulator. See this documentation Documentation.pdf and this script array_config_to_oskar_tm.py.txt with the accompanying README README.txt.

When the upgrade of Karabo to Python 3.10 is done, ska-ost-array-config should be properly integrated to allow up-to-date SKA telescope layouts and custom subarrays to be directly loaded from there into Karabo. The integration should also allow to use the layouts with RASCIL, not just OSKAR. For RASCIL, we currently only offer the (at least partially outdated) telescopes the come with the RASCIL package.

[anawas]

We need to touch the Telescope class as well. I ran into an issue this morning. I'm trying to fix it.
This code with OSKAR works (i.e. it prints 134 baselines, which is correct):

site_tel: Telescope = Telescope.constructor("LOFAR", version=None, backend=SimulatorBackend.OSKAR)
baselines_wgs = site_tel.get_baselines_wgs84()
print(f"{len(baselines_wgs)=}") # len(baselines_wgs)=134

The same code with RASCIL-backend doesn't work:

site_tel: Telescope = Telescope.constructor("LOFAR", version=None, backend=SimulatorBackend.RASCIL)
baselines_wgs = site_tel.get_baselines_wgs84()
print(f"{len(baselines_wgs)=}")  # len(baselines_wgs)=0

The reason is how we initialise the Telescope class. It is done differently for instruments defined in OSKAR tm-files and instruments from RASCIL package.

[anawas]

Closed in PR #631

[mpluess]

Reopening because while some issues were solved in the mentioned PR, ska-ost-array-config is not integrated yet. The idea is to be able to load SKA layouts directly from this library without needing to export them to OSKAR .tm first. Need to wait for the Python 3.10 update though.

[anawas]

I like your idea to load configurations directly without the need for OSKAR .tm files. We should come up with a similar mechanism for ALMA files. You can see in PR #634 that adding a new configuration adds a lot of new files to the Karabo package. It blows up the already pretty big package unnecessarily.