Appendix: Calibration Principles

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Appendix: Calibration Principles

An “ideal” interferometer samples the Fourier transform of the sky brightness multiplied by the antenna beam pattern; these samples are called visibilities. In practice, because of noise, imperfections, sampling, and other effects, several terms perturb the visibilities to produce the true output of a “real” interferometer. The goal of the calibration is to identify and estimate all the important instrumental and atmospheric effects and apply appropriate corrections to recover the true visibilities.

Subsections

- Standard Decomposition of Visibilities
- Baseline versus Antenna based calibration
- Plateau de Bure Online Calibration
- Offline Calibration; the rules of the game