Site menu:

Observations


The observations of bm360 have begun in February 2012. Following a suggestion from the NRAO program committee, the 23 pointing positions are not observed once for 12h each, but are observed twice for 6h each, for greater scheduling flexibility. A side-effect of this is reduced coverage of the Fourier plane, but also slightly greater sensitivity, because the amount of observing time spent during the rise and set times of the field is reduced.

Each pointing covers several hundred radio sources, towards each of which a phase centre is directed. Since most sources are located in the overlap region between many pointings, most sources get observed several times. From the VLA catalogues we have isolated 3293 radio components, resulting in 11525 phase centre - pointing combinations.

Here is an overview of the field to be observed, using the VLA image by Schinnerer et al. (2010). The red circles denote the radius within which sources are targeted during an observing run. The pointing positions are the same as for the VLA observations.

The amount of data from this project is considerable: each observation of a phase centre results in up to 250MB of visibility data, or almost 3TB in total. We have applied at the DFG for funding for a PhD position and a suitable computer to store and process the data, but the decision is still pending.