Back to School

It's back to school again for Kevin, as he attends the NRAO 12th Synthesis Imaging Workshop, which is the reason why we're here in Socorro. There are like 150 participants - mostly graduate students, postdocs and researchers working in optical/ infrared/ high-energy astronomy wanting to learn a bit about radio astronomy. The sessions are held at New Mexico Tech, which appears as some sort of oasis in the middle of the desert, with its lawns and gardens.

Attending 5 to 6 lectures a day can be really exhausting on the mind, especially if the topic is way over one's head. But like any good undergraduate student, all one needs to do is to revise every night (yea, right!).

After 3 days of lectures, some really helpful, others partially incomprehensible, Kevin was glad for the change in program. Friday was a full day of data reduction tutorials, using the latest NRAO software package - CASA. He managed to produce an OK image of the supernova remnant 3C391 - there's still quite a bit of noise in the background. This source was observed using the Expanded Very Large Array (EVLA) of the NRAO, a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement with Associated Universities, Inc (Yes, we need to mention all these to give proper credit and avoid any intellectual property issues!). Anyway, CASA and the tutorial data are all available for download here, for those who may be interested to try it out. UNIX-based platform required though... which means it doesn't work on Windows!

During lunch, the participants were all given a tour of the NRAO Science Operations Centre, where we were having our tutorials. The building acts as an office for all NRAO staff in Socorro, and houses the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA) Operations Room. It is here where the 10 VLBA telescopes scattered throughout the US are controlled, and their data gathered, correlated, processed etc.

Quite a bit of the engineering design and prototyping for the NRAO telescopes are done here as well. We were given a tour of the engineering lab, which extends throughout an entire floor of the building!