| Description: | Friday 12th October marked the first day of the APERTIF shakedown, an operations test designed to help us assess how the overall system is doing and how close we are to our aimed-for model of operations. For 11 days straight, there will be a mix of interferometric and ARTS observations, as well as calibrations, in an action-packed schedule. We'll be making use of both the APERTIF Task DataBase (ATDB) and the APERTIF Long Term Archive (ALTA) to manage and ingest all observations carried out. For the APERTIF imaging surveys, the goal will be to test the current reduction pipeline, assess data quality, and determine the effectiveness of survey observing and calibration strategy. For ARTS, observations will be conducted for science cases involving timing pulsars and finding new FRBs. These observations will test the system stability and sensitivity over long duration observations as well as the real-time transient search pipeline AMBER. The lead-up to this first APERTIF shakedown has been a culmination of a lot of effort and hard work by many people, only some of which are pictured in this photo. We are looking forward to a busy 11 days, as well as many lessons learned to help us improve APERTIF for the fast-approaching start of 2019! |
