After this course you are ready to engage in scientific discussions that concern radio observations of astrophysical phenomena. You can compare how various radio telescopes and observing modes can be used optimally to investigate the astrophysical processes that generate long wavelength emission.
After this course you can:
Write a clear, concise report describing a radio-interferometric data reduction and subsequent image analysis;
Develop a data reduction process from raw radio interferometric data to science-quality images;
Write an observing proposal for an appropriate radio telescope to answer a scientific question;
Analyse quantitatively how radio interferometric concepts affect a specific scientific result;
Explain if and why certain radio image features are astrophysical or not;
Analyse to what extent signals are mutually coherent;
Identify common radio-astronomical data visualizations with their axis labels removed;
Identify the type of astrophysical object visualized in a figure;
Perform basic Fourier-analyses, such as deriving a SINC function andqualitatively predicting the telescope’s response to a small collection of elementary shapes;
Describe (the function of) common components involved in a telescope’s signal processing;
Outcome:
You will gain an understanding of how to plan and take high contrast imaging data, how to interpret the attained sensitivity by generating contrast curves, and understand how several different algorithms are used and implemented to increase the sensitivity for faint point and extended sources.
After completing this course, you will be able to:
Identify the data reduction techniques required to extract the astrophysical source
Write computer code and reuse code developed during the course
Determine the signal to noise of the resultant observations
Identify artifacts introduced by the algorithms and determine astrophysical signals
