T. L. Grobler, A. J. Stewart, S. J. Wijnholds, J. S. Kenyon and
O. M. Smirnov, "Calibration artefacts in radio interferometry -
III. Phase-only calibration and primary beam correction," Monthly
Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, V461, no. 3, pp2975-2992,
September 2016.
abstract:
This is the third installment in a series of papers in which we
investigate calibration artefacts. Calibration artefacts (also known
as ghosts or spurious sources) are created when we calibrate with an
incomplete model. In the first two papers of this series we developed
a mathematical framework which enabled us to study the ghosting
mechanism itself. An interesting concomitant of the second paper was
that ghosts appear in symmetrical pairs. This could possibly account
for spurious symmetrization. Spurious symmetrization refers to the
appearance of a spurious source (the anti-ghost) symmetrically
opposite an unmodelled source around a modelled source. The analysis
in the first two papers indicates that the anti-ghost is usually very
faint, in particular when a large number of antennas are used. This
suggests that spurious symmetrization will mainly occur at an almost
undetectable flux level. In this paper, we show that phase-only
calibration produces an anti-ghost that is $N$-times (where $N$
denotes the number of antennas in the array) as bright as the one
produced by phase and amplitude calibration and that this already
bright ghost can be further amplified by the primary beam
correction.
back to publication
list
|