Yearly Archives

The LOFAR Data Processing School was hosted on 22-26 March 2021 online at ASTRON. The school provided a basic overview of the telescope and its science together with dedicated technical tutorials for data retrieval, pre-processing and visualisation.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the school was shaped into an online event. The processing school counted more than 120 participants worldwide including 16 staff members and students from IANAO and TUS.  The attendees  of the school received first-hand experience of the processing pipelines of LOFAR, and learned the basics of data reduction in hands-on workshops. IANAO and TUS staff got familiar with requesting and downloading data; they were introduced to the data formats and to the various softwares for flagging and calibrating the data.

An online platform with pre-recorded sessions and real-time tutorials replaced the physical presence at ASTRON. The platform consisted in several Zoom rooms plus a Slack messaging and video platform where all the different lectures, demos and tutorials could be followed, giving the possibility to ask questions and share answers with the participants.

In addition to the Slack and Zoom platform, information of the Data School was shared with the participants via a dedicated website https://www.astron.nl/lofarschool2021/. Here the recordings of the lectures may also be found, allowing students to re-watch the material if necessary.

The first activity of the STELLAR project took place in mid-February! The Introduction to Antennas course, originally planned to be held at ASTRON (in Dwingeloo, The Netherlands) for up to six people (faculty, researchers, and students) from the Institute of Astronomy (BAS) and the Technical University of Sofia, was transformed into an online course due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The course was attended by 57 participants from 13 research institutions!

The short course was held over Zoom, as three separate three-hour-long lectures. It was led by Dr. David Prinsloo of ASTRON – an expert in the design of antennas and antenna arrays for radio astronomy. Dr. Prinsloo is a researcher with the Smart Front-ends Group at the Innovations and Systems department of The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy. His primary research interest is on antenna designs for both phased array and reflector-based radio telescopes.

The course participants learned the ins and outs of fundamental antenna parameters, basic antenna types, as well as antenna arrays. As the final module of the course, the students participated in the design of a realistic antenna array.

The full course recordings are available here!