The next activity of the STELLAR project was the LOFAR Science Workshop, which was held July 26-30, 2021, at ASTRON’s beautiful building near Dwingeloo, The Netherlands. The Bulgarian team, made up of six scientists, PhD and undergraduate students from the Institute of Astronomy (BAS) and two scientists from the Techical University of Sofia, learned about the research done with LOFAR, with an accent on space weather and the Earth’s ionosphere. Tutorials and exercises in processing and analyzing LOFAR data were led by Dr. Pietro Zucca and Dr. Maaijke Mevius. The Bulgarian team had the opportunity to visit the LOFAR core and the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT), and enjoyed the cool Dutch summer!

During the Workshop, the visiting team learned about:

1. Long Term Archive (LTA)

Basic query on the LTA. How to search, stage and retrieve the dataset. 

2. Processing the beamformed data

Plotting the beamformed data and creating previews of the detasets.

3. Processing interferometric data

Calibration steps and beam/clock corrections.

4. Science visualization of solar data

Plotting the interferometric and beamformed data with the heliocentric coordinate systems and comparison tied array data with interferometric with different baselines. 

5. Visit of facilities

Visit of the telescopes and training on the different telescope modes to observe the Sun, the Heliosphere and the ionosphere.

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