This year the Murchison Widefield Array annual December meeting was hosted by Arizona State University, here in Tempe. In celebration of over a year of active observing the meeting was opened to attendance and contributions from the wider community. The result was a rare convocation of the low frequency radio astronomy community. Topics ranged from …
Early Science from Low-frequency Radio Telescopes Read More »
This week, in conjunction with the Low Frequency meeting, the MWA 21 cm science team got together to have a data crunch. A good time was had by all except the data which was severely crunched and is now much reduced from its former self. We set up shop in a conference room, generously loaned to …
This semester I start work in earnest on a new project thats been simmering in the background, the External Calibrator for Hydrogen Observatories (ECHO) an experimental method to provide an airborne calibration source for wide-field radio arrays observing Hydrogen at cosmological distances. In particular, accurate maps of the primary beam (the response of the receiver …
Check out this article in Science magazine on Epoch of Reionization observations that really hits some interesting points not often covered in the media like the origin story of the MWA and LOFAR and the race to make a detection. Intrepid reporter Daniel Clery extracted some great quotes from the various PIs but my favorite is from Saleem Zaroubi: To …
ASU undergrad and AZ Space Grant intern Michael Busch has been stopping by my office this semester, helping me look at MWA cosmology data and learning about radio astronomy. Turns out he’s a Pillar of the Community! Among other things he’s a Residential Assistant, responsible for a passel of undergrads in the newly refurbished Manzanita …
Here is a composite image of the entire sky in radio frequencies. It shows data from Parkes, Jodrell Bank and Effelsburg (ie the “Haslam map“, technically for you astro nerds the Global Sky Model by Angelica de Oliviera Costa which includes some data from other observations) as well as point sources from the VLA in …
Check out this MWA image of the galactic plane from David Kaplan (UWM). The image of 150MHz radiation covers 80 degrees wide and has a resolution of about 5 arcminutes. At about 125million pixels its a bit large to digest, so I’ve uploaded it to Gigapan, where you can pan and zoom ala google maps. …
A nice composite of Centaurus A (as imaged by PAPER) and the moon to scale. Almost ten times the size of the moon, it really is a remarkable sight. Or would be if we could only see in the radio. For more, see Stefan et al.
Paper Title: A Flux Scale for Southern Hemisphere 21cm EoR Experiments arxiv,data,fits If you look at typical catalogs of sources in the southern hemisphere epoch of reionization band you soon realize why measurements often disagree by 20%. Even the brightest sources one would use for calibration are uncertain. As you can see from the plot to …
Title: The precision and accuracy of early Epoch of Reionization foreground models: comparing MWA and PAPER 32-antenna source catalogs This paper compares the fluxes in the first PAPER and MWA catalogs. These sources are the brightest foregrounds in front of the EoR HI emission. Various estimates suggest that we have to subtract these guys to anywhere …
Publication: The precision and accuracy of early Epoch of Reionization foreground models Read More »