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Alright folks here's a snapshot of a small part of the radio sky to started off a little thread about observing with the CSIRO's #ATCA telescope 🧵 #radioastrophysics #radioastronomy #astronomy #radio #telescope

Once connected the 1st step is to calibrate the #radiotelescope array. This involves observing well-known sources of #radio light which are bright and don't change too much. We also need to calibrate the #signals between the 6 different dishes of the array 📡 📡 📡 📡 📡 📡

Calibrations are critical because the #radio waves are arriving at each #antenna at a slightly different time, which would lead to garbage #data if we didn't correct for it 🗑️ The colours show us the signal between a pair of radio antennas and how their amplitudes, phases, and delays line up 🏳️‍🌈

This takes 10-30 mins (depending on observing conditions) and if everything works you should get mostly flat #signals for each baseline (pair of dishes) across all of the channels in your band - the frequency range you're observing. This is what it looks like for a calibrator source at 5.5 GHz