Journal article
Low-frequency imaging of fields at high galactic latitude with the murchison widefield Array 32 element prototype
CL Williams, JN Hewitt, AM Levine, A De Oliveira-Costa, JD Bowman, FH Briggs, BM Gaensler, LL Hernquist, DA Mitchell, MF Morales, SK Sethi, R Subrahmanyan, EM Sadler, W Arcus, DG Barnes, G Bernardi, JD Bunton, RC Cappallo, BW Crosse, BE Corey Show all
Astrophysical Journal | Published : 2012
Abstract
The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a new low-frequency, wide-field-of-view radio interferometer under development at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. We have used a 32 element MWA prototype interferometer (MWA-32T) to observe two 50° diameter fields in the southern sky, covering a total of 2700 deg2, in order to evaluate the performance of the MWA-32T, to develop techniques for epoch of reionization experiments, and to make measurements of astronomical foregrounds. We developed a calibration and imaging pipeline for the MWA-32T, and used it to produce 15′ angular resolution maps of the two fields in the 110-200MHz band. We perform a blind source extraction ..
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Grants
Awarded by National Science Foundation
Funding Acknowledgements
This scientific work uses data obtained from the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. We acknowledge the Wajarri Yamatji people as the traditional owners of the observatory site. Support for this work comes from the Australian Research Council (grant Nos. LE0775621 and LE0882938), the National Science Foundation (grant Nos. AST-0457585, AST-0821321, AST-0908884, AST-1008353, and PHY-0835713), the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant No. FA9550-0510247), the Australian National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy, Australia India Strategic Research Fund, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the MIT School of Science, MIT's Marble Astrophysics Fund, the Raman Research Institute, the Australian National University, the iVEC Petabyte Data Store, the NVIDIA sponsored CUDA Center for Excellence at Harvard University, and the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research, a Joint Venture of Curtin University of Technology and the University of Western Australia, funded by the Western Australian State government. The Centre for All-sky Astrophysics is an Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, funded by grant CE11E0001020. The MRO is managed by the CSIRO, who also provide operational support to the MWA. This research work has used the TIFR GMRT Sky Survey (http://tgss.ncra.tifr.res.in) data products. C.L.W. thanks Adrian Liu, and Leo Stein for helpful discussions and comments, as well as the Halleen family for their hospitality at Boolardy Station while working at the MRO.