Calibration and Editing - hartrao.ac.za.pptVIP

Calibration Michael Bietenholz Synopsis Why calibration and editing? Editing and RFI Idealistic formalism → Realistic practice Practical Calibration Baseline- and Antenna-based Calibration Intensity Calibration Example Full Polarization Generalization A Dictionary of Calibration Effects Calibration Heuristics New Calibration Challenges Summary Why Calibration and Editing? Synthesis radio telescopes, though well-designed, are not perfect (e.g., surface accuracy, receiver noise, polarization purity, stability, etc.) Need to accommodate deliberate engineering (e.g., frequency conversion, digital electronics, filter bandpass, etc.) Passage of radio signal through the Earth’s atmosphere Hardware or control software occasionally fails or behaves unpredictably Scheduling/observation errors sometimes occur (e.g., wrong source positions) Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) Determining instrumental properties (calibration) is a prerequisite to determining radio source properties Calibration Strategy Observe calibrator sources in addition to our program sources These are sources with a known location and known properties, usually point sources (or nearly so) Ideally, they are nearby on the sky to our target source By examining the visibility measurements for the calibrator sources, where we know what they should be, we can estimate our instrumental properties, often called the calibration We can then use these estimates of the instrumental properties to calibrate the visibility data for the program source In general the instrumental properties vary with time, with frequency and with position on the sky One usually uses different calibrator sources to obtain different parts of the calibration (flux density scale, polarization etc, etc), trying to separate out those aspects which change on different timescales (generally: instrumental – long timescales; atmosphere – short timescales) What Does the Raw Data Look Like? Calibration and Editing Calibration and editing (fla