Centennial Honors College
Western Illinois University
Undergraduate Research Day 2012
Poster Presentation
Characterization of Arecibo Calibrators for Observations of Galactic Sources
Daniel Halbe
Faculty Mentor: Esteban D. Araya
Physics
In radio astronomy, all science projects require observations of calibrators to check
pointing performance and sensitivity. The calibrators must be small with respect to the
beam of the telescope, and bright enough to be detected within a few seconds. The
305m Arecibo Telescope is the largest single dish telescope in the world, and it has
mostly been used for observations at 1 GHz. Receivers developed and installed in the
last decade enable observations at higher frequencies (5 GHz and above),
but the standard list of calibrators provided by the observatory is optimized for 1 GHz
observations. The goal of this project is to obtain a sub-sample of calibrators from the
standard Arecibo list that are suitable for galactic studies at 5 GHz. We selected all
calibrators within 10 degrees from the galactic plane, and based on their flux density
obtained from the VLA calibration manual, and morphology from NVSS and NRAO-VLA
archive images, we classified the calibrators as ideal, good/marginal, and unsuitable for
5 GHz galactic observations. We found that, out of the 66 calibrators in the original list,
only four are ideal for galactic observations with Arecibo at 5 GHz.