PrimaBERA

A radio telescope’s image is shaped by its primary beam — the reception equivalent of an antenna’s radiation pattern. The observation is a convolution of the beam with the sky, and the resulting image is further modulated by it, so producing high-quality images with good resolution and dynamic range means removing the beam’s effects. The goal of PrimaBERA is to build usable, lightweight models of the primary beams of modern radio telescopes using analytical functions.

A sparse representation of the primary beams of the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) in New Mexico was published in 2019; the same technique was then applied to MeerKAT in the Karoo, South Africa, and released as the Python package EIDOS. Current work extends EIDOS to the beams of LOFAR, in synergy with the CHronOS project.