1 Introduction

The Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) is a 12-meter radio telescope at the best accessible site for submillimeter observations, Llano de Chajnantor in Chile's Atacama desert.

Figure 1.1: The APEX telescope at Chajnantor, Images from the APEX handover, Nov. 2003

BoA is a new software and will be used for the reduction of data obtained with the bolometer arrays at the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment (APEX) telescope, at the IRAM 30m telescope and at the Heinrich-Herz Telescope (HHT). BoA shall include most of the functionalities of the current reduction packages MOPSI and NIC, in a programming environment which is easier to modify, maintain, and re-use. Unlike the current packages, BoA shall naturally interface with an observation management and calibration database, and it shall aid well in hardware commissioning and debugging.

BoA is a collaborative effort of the Astronomisches Institut der Ruhr-Universität Bochum (AIRUB) and the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie (MPIfR) Bonn, and invites participation by all interested parties.

The initiative to build a new bolometer software package is motivated and financially supported by a ``Verbundforschung'' grant by the German Ministry of Research and Education (BMBF) to the AIRUB and MPIfR to build LABOCA, a large bolometer array camera for APEX .

APEX is a 12-meter radio telescope at the best accessible site for submillimeter observations, Llano de Chajnantor in Chile's Atacama desert. APEX is an international collaboration led by the Millimeter and Submillimeter astronomy group at the MPIfR. AIRUB, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) and the Onsala Space Observatory (OSO) agreed with the MPIfR to share APEX funding and observing time, with 10% of the observing time set aside for Chilean astronomers. The antenna has been constructed by VERTEX Antennentechnik and erection at the site was finished in spring time of 2004.

This document describes how to reduce LABOCA data and includes detailed descriptions of each task.