Radio Interferometry SS 2019 (astro8404)
Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi, Dr. Benjamin Magnelli, Dr. Stefanie Mühle, Dr. Alvaro Sánchez-MongeCourse Material
Important note: The following lecture material is only intended for the personal use of the registered participants and may therefore be encrypted with a password. By accessing the material, whether encrypted or not, you agree that you won't share the material or the password with anyone not registered for this course and that you won't make the files or the password available online.
Lecture slides
Earth's atmosphere and the system temperature
Special applications: Self-calibration
Special applications: Polarization, VLBI
Material for the hands-on part
script for calibration, week 1
script for calibration, week 2
script for calibration, week 3
script for calibration, week 4
script for calibration, week 5
script for imaging and analysis, week 3
Data
The class data set is the data set that will be used during the hands-on work in class.
The exam data set is the data set for the milestones and the presentation/paper. Each participant taking this course for credit needs to work on this data set on their own and to submit their material for the milestones. Participants not taking the course for credit are also welcome to work on this data set and submit material in order to get feedback on their progress.
The local participants will find a copy of the two data sets in their project accounts. The remote participants are cordially invited to download the data to their own machines:
Milestones
During the course, there will be three milestones that will help you to get your course work done in good time. If you take this course for credit, you are expected to hand in certain products of your data reduction by the due date of each milestone. If you do not take this course for credit, but would like us to check your progress, you are welcome to hand in material as well. The anticipated deadlines are 09 May, 06 June, and 04 July.
Milestone 1 went online on 24 April and had a due date of 09 May. Milestone 2 went online on 29 May with a deadline of 19 June. Milestone 3 is online since 21 June and was due on 08 July. Please note that on request of the course participants, the deadline for Milestone 3 has been extended to 08 July 23:59 CEST! The deadline printed on the instructions' sheet may be ignored.
Literature
Synthesis Imaging in Radio Astronomy II, ASP Conference Series, V. 180, 1998, Editors: Taylor, Carilli, Perley
Interferometry and Synthesis in Radio Astronomy (Wiley 2001), by Thompson, Moran, Swenson
Tools of Radio Astronomy, Sixth Edition (Springer 2013), by Wilson, Rohlfs, Hüttemeister
astro841: Radio Astronomy, graduate-level course at Bonn university
Software
Throughout this course, we will use the Common Astronomy Software Applications package (CASA) for the reduction and analysis of our interferometric data. The main source of information related to CASA is the CASA homepage.
In class, we will use the CASA release 5.1.1-5. Local participants will have the option to use a server with this CASA version already installed. Remote participants who want to participate in the hands-on exercises are kindly requested to download and install CASA on one of their local machines following the detailed installation instructions.
The official documentation for CASA release 5.1.1-5 is available through this link. A pdf version of the CASA cookbook (for an older release) can be found here.