Early images of the sky reflect progress in BETA commissioning

11 June 2014

New images of the sky show that CSIRO's ASKAP is functioning as an aperture-synthesis telescope after just a few months of commissioning.

"We've never had a telescope like this before," said CSIRO's Dr David McConnell, who leads the ASKAP Commissioning and Early Science team, ACES, "We can see that the novel aspects of its design really do work, and that it will outperform a conventional telescope."

One of the images, of a field containing a number of distant galaxies, covers 10 square degrees on the sky òÀÔ 50 times larger than the full Moon òÀÔ and was made from nine overlapping beams captured simultaneously, with a dynamic range of 50,000:1.

The quality of the image vindicates ASKAP's two novel features:

• The telescope's 'phased array feeds': new technology developed by CSIRO allows the telescope to see large areas of sky at once.
• The antennasòÀÙ third axis of rotation: as the telescope tracks radio sources, the PAF is kept in a fixed orientation to the sky, eliminating artefacts from bright sources at the beam edges.

The second image is of neutral atomic hydrogen gax (HI) from the NGC253 galaxy, capturing both the intensity of the radio waves and how the galaxy is rotating.

The phased array feeds (PAFs) used for these commissioning tests are the 'first generation', or Mk I, design. The first six ASKAP antennas equipped with the Mk I PAF receivers and all associated electronics at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory is known as the Boolardy Engineering Test Array (BETA), a test array used to help the commissioning team prepare for the fit-out of the full ASKAP telescope.

For more information, read the CSIRO Media Release, or the latest edition of the ASKAP Update.

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