Daily Image
17-09-2014
LOFAR Imaging Busy Week XXI
| Submitter: | George Heald |
| Description: | In some societies, you're not really an adult until you reach 21. By that reckoning LOFAR imaging is now all grown up! The twenty-first installment of LOFAR's successful series of Imaging Busy Weeks took place during the first week of September 2014 at ASTRON. The focus of this busy week was the developments being made by the Calibration and Imaging Tiger Team (CITT). Enhancements are being made by the CITT to the Standard Imaging Pipeline, in order to quickly and robustly produce science-grade images from LOFAR interferometric observations. These enhancements are still in development and require expert testing to ensure that they are up to scratch! For that reason the CITT is working closely with a broad range of scientists within the collaboration. Highlights of the busy week included: testing of our fast calibration routine (based on "Stefcal") that offers a vast improvement in runtime and memory usage; imaging with the new and more capable LOFAR awimager; testing the CITT automated self-calibration pipeline; and testing of determination and application of ionospheric phase screens to LBA and HBA imaging data. We also experimented with some of the tools developed by the EoR group (for example, producing movies like this one), heard an exciting update on the "extreme peeling" strategy employed by Reinout van Weeren, and took steps toward making that sophisticated scheme available to other users.Today's image shows some candid photos of the Busy Week team hard at work. The background is a high resolution (5"), deep (~500 μJy/beam), broad bandwidth (55 MHz) image produced using data calibrated by the CITT selfcal pipeline (see this image from the archives). It demonstrates that deep, wide field of view and broad bandwidth imaging is within our grasp — and that there is still more progress to be made in the pipeline to implement direction dependent calibration and imaging! These developments will be the focus of future busy weeks. |
| Copyright: | LOFAR CITT |
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