Daily Image
06-02-2015
Assembly instructions for a LOFAR station
| Submitter: | Pieter Benthem |
| Description: | Over the last few years, LOFAR stations have become a successful export product. More and more scientific institutes in more and more countries crave them, to partake in the dizzy adventure of exploring the sky in a truly European fashion. Of course, they are also pretty cool backyard items, and excellent value for money. As our experience grows, we get ever better at packaging things in such a way that the new owners can roll out their station with a minimum of fuss. One of our Finnish friends was so impressed that he created these IKEA-like assembly instructions. His kind gesture was much appreciated by the ASTRON Family Service Division (AFSD). The exported LOFAR stations can be used stand-alone, but also as part of an ever-growing fibre-linked array that is centered on the superterp in Exloo (NL). They represent long baselines that allow observations with very high spatial resolution (1" for a baseline of 400km, @150MHz). These baselines can be made extra sensitive by using the entire LOFAR core as a single station. Among other things, such long baselines give LOFAR an important advantage in the ability to remove the many foreground sources that obscure the elusive Epoch of Reionization (EoR). |
| Copyright: | Derek McKay-Bukowski |
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