LuSEE-Night is a pathfinder radio telescope on the lunar far side employing four 3-m monopole antennas arranged as two horizontal cross pseudo-dipoles on a rotational stage and sensitive to the radio sky in the 1-50 MHz frequency band. LuSEE-Night measures the corresponding 16 correlation products as a function of frequency. While each antenna combination measures radiation coming from a large area of the sky, their aggregate information as a function of phase in the lunar cycle and rotational stage position can be deconvolved into a low-resolution map of the sky. We study this deconvolution using linear map-making based on the Wiener filter algorithm. We illustrate how systematic effects can be effectively marginalised over as contributions to the noise covariance and demonstrate this technique on beam knowledge uncertainty and gain fluctuations. With reasonable assumptions about instrument performance, we show that LuSEE-Night should be able to map the sub-50 MHz sky at a ~5-degree resolution.
@article{arxiv.2508.16773,
title = {Linear map-making with LuSEE-Night},
author = {Hugo Camacho and Kaja M. Rotermund and Anže Slosar and Stuart D. Bale and David W. Barker and Jack Burns and Christian H. Bye and Johnny Dorigo Jones and Adam Fahs and Keith Goetz and Sven Herrmann and Joshua J. Hibbard and Oliver Jeong and Marc Klein-Wolt and Léon V. E. Koopmans and Joel Krajewski and Zack Li and Corentin Louis and Milan Maksimović and Ryan McLean and Raul A. Monsalve and Paul O'Connor and Aaron Parsons and Michel Piat and Marc Pulupa and Rugved Pund and David Rapetti and Benjamin Saliwanchik and Graham Speedie and Nikolai Stefanov and David Sundkvist and Aritoki Suzuki and Harish K. Vedantham and Fatima Yousuf and Philippe Zarka},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.16773},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
13 pages, 9 figures - Published in the Open Journal of Astrophysics