I present first results of LOFAR observations with international baselines. An important cornerstone was the detection of the first long-baseline fringes. Their analysis turns out to be extremely useful to investigate and solve a number of technical issues of the instrument. Crude maps of the sky are created from single-baseline delay/fringe-rate spectra and compared with a short-baseline synthesis map. First long-baseline LBA images are shown of the source 3C196, a bright quasar whose sub-components can only be resolved with the long baselines. The corresponding sub-arcsec HBA image does not show the same amount of details yet, but HBA results are expected to improve significantly very soon. The LBA long-baseline image of 3C196 comprises the highest-resolution radio map ever produced at this low frequency.
@article{arxiv.1008.4358,
title = {Long baseline experiments with LOFAR},
author = {Olaf Wucknitz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1008.4358},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
12 pages with colour figures. Talk presented at the International SKA Forum 2010 (10-14 June 2010, Assen, NL), to appear in PoS(ISKAF2010)058 at http://pos.sissa.it/cgi-bin/reader/conf.cgi?confid=112 . Original presentation and additional material available at http://www.astro.uni-bonn.de/~wucknitz/publications/pub.php?2010_iskaf_assen_lofar