Wide-field VLBI imaging without supercomputers

Talk in the symposium The next era in radio astronomy: the pathway to SKA at JENAM 2009, 20-23 April 2009

O. Wucknitz [1]

  1. Argelander-Institut für Astronomie, Auf dem Hügel 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany

Abstract

VLBI offers the highest resolution of all observing techniques. At the same time, the field of view is intrinsically only limited by the primary beam of individual telescopes and thus not necessarily smaller than that of connected interferometers. Doing the exercise in practice, however, is still a major challenge. Correlations have to be done with high spectral and temporal resolution, which produces considerable data volumes. Mapping these large data sets for very many facets in the standard way becomes so prohibitively expensive that more efficient ways have to be found. In this contribution I discuss such an approach that increases the efficiency by orders of magnitude. This method has already been used to produce full primary-beam maps in a test case and is currently being tested and improved further. Very efficient imaging methods are not only required for current VLBI instrumentation but will also be essential to make long-baseline SKA imaging possible with realistic efforts.




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Script last modified on 7 Sep 2010
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