Radio Interferometry SS 2026 (astro8404)

Prof. Dr. Frank Bertoldi, Prof. Dr. Arshia Jacob, Dr. Stefanie Mühle, Dr. Yiqing Song, Sylvia Adscheid, Lynn Hansen, Kamalpreet Kaur, Dr. Yiqing Song

Course Links:
Main page
Schedule
Material

Course 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 hands-on part

Material for the tutorial on 23 April 2026:

Preparatory tutorial (for those not familiar with command-line Linux): 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.

my_first_script.py

Data sets

The lecture data set (~5.7 GB) is the data set that is being used in the video tutorials. Solutions to the data reduction steps in form of a template script for this data set will be posted after each tutorial.

The homework data set (~5.8 GB) is a data set that all participants can use for practicing their data reduction skills and that can be discussed with the tutors.

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 " with the checksum provided in the readme file. The data and scripts are available in form of tarballs that need to be unpacked by typing "tar -xvf filename.tar" prior to being used in CASA.

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.

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 13 Proposer's Guide (example of relevant technical parameters and procedures)

ALMA Cycle 13 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.