Title:	Low frequency imagingof fields at high galactic latitude with the murchison widefield array 32 element prototype
Authors:	Williams, Christopher L. Hewitt, Jacqueline N Levine, Alan M. Oliveira-Costa, Angelica de Bowman, Judd D. Briggs, Frank H. Gaensler, B.M. Hernquist, Lars L. Mitchell, D.A. Morales, M.F. Sethi, S.K. Subrahmanyan, Ravi Roshi, Anish D. +44 Co-authors
Keywords:	dark ages reionization first stars instrumentation interferometers data analysis surveys
Issue Date:	10-Aug-2012
Publisher:	IOP Publishing Ltd.
Citation:	The Astrophysical journal, 2013, Vol.755, p47
Abstract:	The Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) is a new low-frequency, wide-field-of-view radio interferometer under development at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory in Western Australia. We have used a 32 element MWA prototype interferometer (MWA-32T) to observe two 50° diameter fields in the southern sky, covering a total of ~2700 deg2, in order to evaluate the performance of the MWA-32T, to develop techniques for epoch of reionization experiments, and to make measurements of astronomical foregrounds. We developed a calibration and imaging pipeline for the MWA-32T, and used it to produce ~15' angular resolution maps of the two fields in the 110-200 MHz band. We perform a blind source extraction using these confusion-limited images, and detect 655 sources at high significance with an additional 871 lower significance source candidates. We compare these sources with existing low-frequency radio surveys in order to assess the MWA-32T system performance, wide-field analysis algorithms, and catalog quality. Our source catalog is found to agree well with existing low-frequency surveys in these regions of the sky and with statistical distributions of point sources derived from Northern Hemisphere surveys; it represents one of the deepest surveys to date of this sky field in the 110-200 MHz band.
Description:	Restricted Access. An open-access version is available at arXiv.org (one of the alternative locations)
URI:	http://hdl.handle.net/2289/5414
ISSN:	0004-637X 1538-4357 (Online)
Alternative Location:	http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2012ApJ...755...47W http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.5790 http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/755/1/47
Copyright:	2012 IOP Publishing Ltd.
Appears in Collections:	Research Papers (A&A)

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