Deadline for Proposal for UK Standalone Observations Monday 30th April

A reminder that the deadline for the first call for propsals to use the LOFAR-UK station in standalone mode is 5pm this coming Monday 30th April.

For more details see the Announcement of Opportunity.

LOFAR Single Station Meeting May 2012 in Nancay, France

The 2012 annual meeting of LOFAR Single Station users will happen in Nancay, France on 9th May 2012.

LBAs in the Snow in Nancay. Image credit: Station de Radioastronomie de Nancay

This annual meeting brings together the local teams and the users of the different international LOFAR stations. This is the opportunity to discuss problems related to the installation, the administration and the scientific and educational use of LOFAR stations in "single station" mode, i.e. when they are not connected to the LOFAR network. The international teams are working on various aspects of "single station" software (see LOFAR wiki), and it is important to maintain a maximum of cohesion and to maximise the visibility of all tools.

Please visit the meeting website for more information. 

LOFAR-UK Call for Proposals for Standalone Observations

View of the LOFAR site at Chilbolton, with the Low Band Array (LBA) in the foreground. Credit: STFC/SEPnet

LOFAR-UK is pleased to announce the opportunity for scientists to carry out shared-risk observations using the UK LOFAR station at Chilbolton as a stand-alone facility. (Observations taken as part of the
International LOFAR Telescope array are co-ordinated through the ILT)

The LOFAR-Chilbolton array operates in the low radio frequency regime, from ~20-80 MHz and 110-240 MHz. The important station parameters (bandwidth, theoretical sensitivity, allowed frequency settings, primary beam, etc) are fully detailed in this document.  Equiped with the ARTEMIS back-end, the LOFAR Chilbolton station offers unique capabilities for tied-array monitoring, ionospheric riometry, solar spectrography, large-area imaging, and other scientific projects.

LOFAR-UK is making available a minimum of 200 hours of observing time using the facility. This call for proposals is open to any interested observer. However, LOFAR-UK is only able to provide observing support and training to scientists working at LOFAR-UK institutes; for external scientists, some degree of experience with the system is required.

Observations will be carried out in shared-risk mode, and will be subject to the commissioning rules of the LOFAR consortium. Of particular relevance is the publication and authorship policy, to which there is also a supplementary short list of LOFAR-UK Builders for observations using Chilbolton as a stand-alone array.

Proposals for use of the facility may be of up to two A4 pages in length, at a minimum of 11pt font. These two pages should include:

* a self-contained scientific justification for the observations
* one paragraph of text describing the proposed goals, written at a level understandable to an interested member of the general public.
* technical information relating to the observations and required observing time
* any figures and references
* for observers external to LOFAR-UK institutions, an indication of their experience with LOFAR observations.

Proposals should be in pdf format, with a maximum file size of 5MB. They should be submitted by email to:

--> lofar-proposals~a.t~stfc.ac.uk

--> by 5pm on 30th April 2012

For further information, see the LOFAR-UK webpages for astronomers, or email lofar-proposals~a.t~stfc.ac.uk

Special LOFAR Edition of the Jodcast

Following their visit to Chilbolton last month to help with the repairs to LOFAR-UK, the Jodcast has just released their special LOFAR edition.

They talk to Dr Neal Jackson (Manchester) about LOFAR itself; Dr Tom Hassall (Southampton) about using it to detect pulsars and (very soon to be Dr) Anna Kapinska (Portsmouth) about how it can be used to study active galactic nuclei.

LOFAR-UK Repair Day Covered by Discovery News

The LOFAR-UK repair day was covered in a story written by @DrLucyRogers for Discovery News.

"High Winds Ravage British Radio Telescope"

LOFAR part of the STFC Roadmap

LOFAR appears on the STFC Roadmap. LOFAR entry is here.

LOFAR UK Repair Day a Big Success

I just got back from the LOFAR-UK repair day today, and I'm happy to report it was a big success, and also great fun. We finished almost all the repairs from the storm damage last month, and now all but one LBA and one HBA should be running as normal (those last two will be fixed very soon).

Almost 20 volunteer workers (postgrad students and researchers) from the nearby LOFAR-UK Universities in Portsmouth, Southampton and Oxford joined STFC employees for the day of repairs.

We started with the LBA repairs. You might remember that 15 of these in total were damaged and destroyed in the stormy weather - mostly by debris from a broken HBA blowing over the field (and we must not forget again to thank the Chilbolton based STFC staff for their amazing work during the storm to prevent even more damage).

3 of the metal ground sheets were displaced and had to be replaced. Here a crew carry the wire mesh over to its new home.

Where the mesh had been displaced we had to resurvey the site to make sure we put it back in the right place. We did this by measuring distances from the 3 nearest undisplaced antenna. With wavelengths of 1-3 metres, a tolerance of up to 5cm is totally acceptable - but we made sure they were good to better than that where we could. 

Lots of pegs needed to be hammered in again - for example in the below picture where we've just replaced the ground sheet and wire mesh, but we also put 8 extra pegs on each of the 96 LBAs to keep them extra secure the next time the weather turns nasty. That was a lot of new pegs! ;) 

Some of the pegs also got concreted into the ground where they had worked a bit loose. 

Once the ground sheets were back in place (and for the 12 other LBAs where the damage was just to the pole and electronics) we replaced, or put back up the LNAs and poles. In the below picture Derek shows a crew from Portsmouth and Southampton what to do.

Image credit: STFC

The pride in a newly fixed antenna back in the array is clearly evident.

An important part of the job was surveying the field and checking which antennas had been finished. It's surprisingly easy to get lost in a field of 96 LBAs - they all kind of look the same!

Some of the cables needed some attention. This is being done very carefully by Andreas below who hopes to use LOFAR data in his PhD thesis (at Portsmouth).

Spare parts were carefully collected in the below box (properly labelled).

And a final "police sweep" of the field was done at the end of the repairs, to make sure nothing was missed. 

Derek was quite right in his prediction of windy but dry weather, and the Sun even came out towards the end of the day to provide this dramatic shot of the beautiful Chilbolton sky. 

The Chilbolton staff looked after all the volunteers very well, even providing some home baked goodies for our lunch.

Then it was on to the damaged HBA. The railway sleepers which had been temporarily holding things down, and the damaged cover were carefully removed. 

Image credit: STFC

Then a number of us had very important jobs sitting on tile lids to make sure they didn't blow away, while Derek replaced some of the damage polystyrene structure inside the delicate HBAs. Finally we replaced the destroyed lids.

Image credit: STFC

The final job for the HBAs was to survey all the connections tying down the black plastic covers and tighten them where necessary. This involved lying down on the job a bit. No they aren't having a rest - they're working very hard.

A particularly troublesome tie so three heads were better than one!

LOFAR-UK also played host to some visitors for the day. Three members of the Jodcast crew came down from Manchester. You can expect to hear more from them about LOFAR soon. 

We also hosted some media students from Portsmouth Uni CCi who are working on a documentary about LOFAR. 

 Science writer, Dr. Lucy Rogers (@DrLucyRogers) also visited and played a fun game of "guess where I am" on Twitter (Storify of that).

She got to visit the 25m dish along with James Macfarlane, or @rocketengines (who used to work at Chilbolton) and took the below picture of the LOFAR station from up the 25m dish. We're all in that picture busily working on the repairs, although even with our high vis jackets you can't spot us at all..!

Image credit: Dr Lucy Rogers

And we also had a visit from the Andover Advertiser, Chilbolton's local newspaper, who have covered LOFAR before.

All in all it was a successful and fun day, and an interesting change from our usual jobs!