Radio Interferometry SS 2022 (astro8404)
Dr. Lydia Moser, Dr. Stefanie Mühle, Dr. Alvaro Sánchez-Monge, Prof. Dr. Frank BertoldiCourse 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.
Material for the lecture part
Introductory Videos on ALMA, Radio Interferometry and more (Cycle 9 Proposal Preparation Support)
Introduction to Radio Interferometry, part 0
Introduction to Radio Interferometry, part 1
Introduction to Radio Interferometry, part 2
Introduction to Radio Interferometry, part 3
Introduction to Radio Interferometry, part 4
Introduction to Radio Interferometry, part 5
Introduction to Radio Interferometry, part 6
Introduction to Radio Interferometry (videos)
Calibration Basics, part 1: Visibility Corruption
Calibration Basics, part 2: Cross Calibration
Calibration Basics, part 3: Calibration Flow
Calibration 1: import, listobs (slides)
Calibration 1: T_sys, WVR (slides)
Calibration 1: T_sys, WVR - Checks (slides)
Calibration 2: bandpass (slides)
Calibration 3: phase, amplitude (slides)
Calibration 3: flux transfer (slides)
Calibration 3: practical checks (slides)
Calibration 4: inspection (slides)
Calibration 4: inspection - how to ... (slides)
Imaging 1: Visibilities (slides)
Imaging 3: Deconvolution (slides)
Imaging 5: Continuum subtraction (slides)
Imaging 6: Line Imaging (slides)
Imaging 7: Error recognition (slides)
Imaging 8: Visualization and Analysis (slides)
Imaging 8: Visualization and Analysis (video)
Special Topics: Self-Calibration (slides)
Special Topics: Polarization (slides)
Special Topics: Polarization, VLBI (videos)
Material for the hands-on part
Preparatory tutorial (optional): For those new to Linux and command-line computing, there are a number of free introductory tutorials available online. A rather concise one that covers the most important basics in the first 5 chapters (~40 minutes to read) can be found here.
script for calibration, week 1 --- solutions
script for calibration, week 2 --- solutions
script for calibration, week 3 --- solutions
script for calibration, week 4 --- solutions
script for imaging, week 1 --- solutions
script for imaging, week 2 --- solutions
script for imaging, week 3 --- solutions
Data sets
The lecture data set (~5.7 GB) is the data set that will be used during the hands-on work in class. Solutions in form of a template script will be posted after each lecture.
The homework data set (~5.8 GB) is a data set that all participants can use for practicing their data reduction skills. This data set will be discussed in detail in the practice sessions in June.
The exam data set (~10.7 GB) 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 data sets and a suite of analysis scripts in their project accounts. The remote participants are cordially invited to download the data and the analysis scripts to their own machines from this link. Please check that the download has ended successfully by comparing the output of "md5sum
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, 30 May, and 20 June.
Instructions for Milestone 1 were published on 25 April 2022. The deadline for uploading material to the file drop area was 09 May 2022. Instructions for Milestone 2 were published on 14 Mai 2022 and the deadline was at 18:00 CEST on 30 May 2022. Instructions for Milestone 3 were published on 10 June 2022. The deadline was at 10:00 CEST on Monday, 27 June 2022.
Milestone 1 --- Feedback to Milestone 1
Milestone 2 --- Feedback to Milestone 2
Milestone 3 --- Feedback to Milestone 3
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
CASA Guides
astro841: Radio Astronomy, graduate-level course at Bonn university
Essential Radio Astronomy (a basic introduction to radio astronomy in general, as an alternative to astro841)
ALMA Cycle 9 Proposer's Guide (example of relevant technical parameters and procedures)
ALMA Cycle 9 Technical Handbook (detailed technical information specific to ALMA)
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 6.2.1 (ALMA Pipeline). Local master students 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. Detailed installation instructions can be found in the current Release Information. Please note that there are two ways of installing CASA: The monolithic installation requires downloading a tar-file that already includes the necessary Python environment. Alternatively, the latest CASA version (without pipelines) can also be installed as a modular version with pip-wheels. The version that will be used in class is CASA 6.2.1 (ALMA pipeline) and is only available as a tar-file.
The official documentation for the latest CASA releases can be found here. Further documentation is available in the form of CASA Guides.