Wide field imaging for the Square Kilometre Array
Abstract
Wide-field radio interferometric telescopes such as the Square Kilometre Array now being designed are subject to a number of aberrations. One particularly pernicious aberration is that due to non-coplanar baselines whereby long baselines incur a quadratic image-plane phase error. There are numerous algorithms for dealing with the non-coplanar baselines effect. As a result of our experience with developing processing software for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder, we advocate the use of a hybrid algorithm, called w snapshots, based on a combination of w projection and snapshot imaging. This hybrid overcomes some of the deficiencies of each and has advantages from both. Compared to pure w projection, w snapshots uses less memory and execution time, and compared to pure snapshot imaging, w snapshots uses less memory and is more accurate. At the asymptotes, w snapshots devolves to w projection and to snapshots.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1207.5861,
title = {Wide field imaging for the Square Kilometre Array},
author = {T. J. Cornwell and M. A. Voronkov and B. Humphreys},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1207.5861},
year = {2015}
}
Comments
To be presented at SPIE Optic and Photonics, Image Reconstruction from Incomplete Data VII, August 2012