MMA Memo #270

ALMA Configurations with Complete UV Coverage

David Woody [1]

August 5, 1999

Keywords: uv coverage, array, configuration, circular

This memo discusses the importance of obtaining complete UV coverage for an interferometer array and presents configurations that achieve nearly complete coverage using earth rotation synthesis over a limited hour angle range. The configurations are symmetric circular arrays with S identical sectors. These configurations are shown to cover more than 90% of the UV-plane in a few hours for sources between -90 degrees and +50 degrees DEC for an array located at -23 degrees lat. The coverage surpasses 98% for sources at less than -10 degrees DEC or greater than +10 degrees DEC. The array diameter is approximately N²D/4S, where N is the number of telescopes, D their diameter and S the degree of symmetry. An array of 63 twelve-meter telescopes in a five-fold symmetric circular configuration can provide complete UV coverage while achieving an angular resolution of better than .1 arcsec at 1 mm. This configuration will provide noise limited high accuracy images that are an excellent match to images from the Hubble telescope.

[1] OVRO

From here, you can:

View a PDF version of MMA Memo #270.

Download a 0.7MB gzipped postscript version of MMA Memo #270 from

here

Last modified: 1999-dec-09