SLIME is, in essence, just another AIPS task and, just like any other AIPS task, has a set of input adverbs. If you review these inputs (INPUTS SLIME), you will see that they allow you to specify an input file, some data selection criteria and (for multisource inputs files) a set of calibration options. These inputs specify the data the SLIME will fit a model to. Note that SLIME can only work with one source at a time and that the name of this source should be given as the value of SOURCES(1). The other elements of the SOURCES array will be ignored. The current version of SLIME is overly pedantic about the source selection and will require you to give a value to SOURCES(1) when the input file is a single-source data file although this is obviously pointless. If you are using a single-source file the name given in SOURCES(1) is not actually used but SLIME will insist that it is not left blank; this quirk will be removed in future versions.
If your input data is taken from a multisource file, you should, of course, make sure that all of the necessary calibrations will be applied.
When you are satisfied with your inputs, you can start SLIME in the normal way (textbfGO SLIME). You should see the usual AIPS start-up message
SLIME1: Task SLIME (release of 15OCT96) begins AIPS 1: Resumesas SLIME launches itself and restarts the AIPS command interpreter.
If you did not make any mistakes in setting up the inputs, the main window of the SLIME graphical user interface will appear followed by a dialogue that shows that SLIME is loading the data specified by the AIPS inputs as shown in Figure 2.1. Don't worry if it takes a few seconds for these to appear: a short delay is normal.
Figure 2.1: The SLIME main window with the loading progess meter.
You should see the icon on the left side of the dialogue rotating like the sweep-hand of a watch as the data is loaded. It will turn quite fast if you are only loading a single channel but may be rather slow and jerky if you are averaging several channels and IFs together. The dialogue will also show the number of data points loaded so far and the approximate amount of memory that they take up. SLIME has no hard limits on the amount of data it can hold but is limited by the amount of virtual memory available on your machine. Nevertheless, I would advise you to abort the data loading if the amount of data goes much over a megabyte. You can do this by clicking on the Abort button: SLIME will respond by ceasing to load data and dismissing the dialogue. You can continue to work with the data that was loaded up to this point but it will be more sensible in most cases to shut down SLIME and change the data selection parameters or average the data some more.
If you do not abort the data loading, SLIME will automatically dismiss the dialogue when it has loaded all of the data. If you get fed up with looking at the dialogue before then you can get rid of it by clicking on the OK button: SLIME will continue to load data and inform you when all of it has been loaded.