Keeping an Eye on the Sky with I-LOFAR

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As a foundation for the thesis of my undergraduate degree, I worked alongside members of the Irish LOFAR (I-LOFAR) consortium to setup an environment to allow for simple all-sky imaging with the I-LOFAR array for transient searches, RFI identification and outreach purposes.

Above we demonstrate a full sky map in radio, created using an implementation of Tobia Carozzi's Spherical Wave Harmonic Transform in Python through SciPy and Healpy, which was coded over the project.

The images are synthesised using a sparse sampling of data taken from a 24 hour observing campaign we were granted with the I-LOFAR array last year, showing a projection-corrected view the Galactic plane, North Galactic Spur and some of the members of the A-team in mode 3 (41MHz) and 5 (120MHz). The gap on the right represents the southern sky, which we sadly cannot see from Birr.

Over the last few days our work was used for an outreach event[lofar.ie] to help further demonstrate the capabilities of an international LOFAR station for some distinguished visitors to the station.

We'd once again like to thank the members of the ILT community and ASTRON team who provided advice on our observing methodology and observing time to help resolve issues with HBA all sky image synthesis.