6th Long-Baseline Busy Week: First long-baseline maps produced entirely through a pipeline.

© Neal Jackson, Marco Iacobelli, Leah Morabito, for the Long Baseline Working Group Busy Week team.

The 6th Long Baseline Working Group busy week was held at ASTRON in January and it was attended by 18 people, including a group of Latvian researchers in the framework of the 'BALTICS' project. A main goal of the busy week was to test and improve the current pipeline to map sources in a LOFAR Survey Tier-1 field region. LOFAR VLBI allows mapping at 0.3 arcsecond resolution, with sub-mJy sensitivity but data processing is a formidable challenge, especially if dealing with large datasets of the Surveys KSP.

As a result, images were produced which went entirely through the pipeline, thus proving the goodness of the reduction strategy. The displayed picture is an example of mapped sources in the field (J132737+550406 and J132455+545406 in bottom right and left panels, respectively), made with 10 subbands only, not self-calibrated and with sub arcsec resolution.