CABB support and ATCA flux calibration Jamie Stevens ATCA Senior System Scientist 26 May 2010

CSIRO. CABB support and ATCA flux calibration – ATUC meeting, 26 May 2010 Outline CABB and Miriad Calibration Documentation User support

CSIRO. CABB support and ATCA flux calibration – ATUC meeting, 26 May 2010 CABB and Miriad Work has been progressing rapidly on improving Miriad to work with CABB data Zoom bands are now available on the correlator, and can be manipulated in Miriad Flagging routines have been improved pgflag: an improved version of tvflag blflag: can now deal with the larger CABB bandwidths mirflag (name may change): automated flagging based on pieflag ATLOD’s rfiflag option: cuts out known RFI ranges at the very start Lots of small changes have been made to many routines to improve their output ATLOD now corrects 7mm polarisations Probes were mislabelled Still a lot of active development, so update your local Miriad often!

CSIRO. CABB support and ATCA flux calibration – ATUC meeting, 26 May 2010 Calibration A new calibration technique has been developed for CABB data

CSIRO. CABB support and ATCA flux calibration – ATUC meeting, 26 May 2010 Calibration The new calibration technique improves upon the old technique in many ways Clearer how each part of the solution is obtained Is effective in dealing with spectral slope effects across the wider bandwidth Works for all CABB continuum scenarios, and most old-correlator scenarios Flux calibration is improving, although it is still undergoing testing New Uranus model has been constructed from the literature to account for Uranus’ changing orientation Uranus’ polar regions are warmer than its equatorial regions Extended model out to frequencies of 50 GHz Both models are available upon request, but will not be implemented into mainline Miriad until they have been thoroughly checked

CSIRO. CABB support and ATCA flux calibration – ATUC meeting, 26 May 2010 Calibration The search for more mm flux calibrators (project C2050) was put on hold while the Uranus model was being refined The ATCA calibrators project (C007) is continuing, although efforts are being made into automatic reduction of all calibrator data A new database of observations has been constructed, and all calibrator observations from all projects are automatically reduced to maintain records of their fluxes A new web interface to this database is under construction This may allow projects that can not obtain flux calibrator observations of their own to bootstrap to another recently observed and properly calibrated source

CSIRO. CABB support and ATCA flux calibration – ATUC meeting, 26 May 2010 Documentation The Miriad Users Guide has been updated Describes how to reduce CABB continuum data Has details on how CABB data is different to data from the old correlator Calibration section rewritten for the new technique Testing is still on-going on how best to image CABB data, and documentation will be updated as the techniques are refined Zoom bands can be manipulated with Miriad, but only a few real observations have been made Documentation on spectral line reduction will be updated in the near future ATCA Users Guide continues to be updated Chapter 4 (“After your Observations”) has been updated to summarise the CABB continuum reduction techniques more clearly

CSIRO. CABB support and ATCA flux calibration – ATUC meeting, 26 May 2010 User Support A new forum site has been made to assist users with ATCA issues This has had moderate use since its creation 15 members, 26 topics, 94 posts Forum was chosen because: Anyone can post on any topic Answers to topics appear with the questions, making it easy to follow Hopefully will become an answer repository, where people go first to try and find a solution Hosted off-network at the moment, but if it becomes highly valued, we may host it locally

CSIRO. CABB support and ATCA flux calibration – ATUC meeting, 26 May 2010 ATCA Forum Miriad is clearly a hot topic!

Thank you Astronomy & Space Science Jamie Stevens ATCA Senior System Scientist Phone: