NEWS
VieVS days – day 1
The first day of your “VieVS days” is almost over.
A big thanks for our international participants from China, Germany, and Spain as well as to our students which took part. Also a big thanks to today’s lecturers Sigrid Böhm, Helene Wolf, and Johannes Böhm.
We had some really interesting exercises and fruitful discussions during the coffee breaks.
The main focus today was on analyzing Geodetic VLBI sessions using our in-house software VieVS.
Above, you can see Sigrid Böhm during the opening talk.
Below, you can see Helene Wolf who is pointing to a nasty outlier while teaching us how to use VieVS for a single session analysis.
Later on, we learned about analyzing VLBI Intensive sessions by Johannes Böhm and about multi-session processing and global solutions by Sigrid Böhm.
The exercise sheets and presentation slides will be uploaded soon to our VieVS-Wiki.
Tomorrow, we will continue with scheduling and simulations by Matthias Schartner using VieSched++ and VieVS.
Visit of WSRT and LOFAR
Today we visited the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRF) and the Low Frequency Array (LOFAR) as part of the ADASS2019 conference. Especially LOFAR was very interesting since it is a very innovative new kind of telescope. Although it does not look very fancy, the science which can be done by LOFAR is outstanding. It observes at the largely unexplored low-frequency range from 10- 240 MHz and provides several unique observing capabilities. Tens of gigabytes of data are recorded and processed every second which add up to petabyte of data which has to be transported, correlated and archived.
Below is a picture of the Westerbork array with its 14 telescopes:
Vienna contribution to ADASS2019
For the first time, a member of the Higher Geodesy group in Vienna traveled to the Astronomical Data Analysis and Software System (ADASS) conference. This year, ADASS was hosted by the Netherlands in Groningen. Matthias Schartner presented his new VLBI scheduling software VieSched++. Have a look at the abstract.
EU-VGOS meeting at the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie in Bonn
Matthias (left) and Jakob (right) visited the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie in Bonn to discuss the current status and future of the EU-VGOS project.
Inspection of the Vienna Scientific Cluster 4
Jakob, Jamie and Johannes used the chance and visited the Vienna Scientific Cluster 4 (VSC-4) where we will use 10 private nodes for VLBI correlation. We are still waiting for the storage to get started.
Bachelor presentation Markus Mikschi
On September 10, 2019, Markus Mikschi presented his bachelor thesis on the integration of length-of-day values for the determination of UT1. Depending on the calibration, it is possible to achieve an accuracy of 40 microseconds after a week. It should also be noted here, that his presentation was the last one in our “old meeting room” with all things prepared for the move to Freihaus.
DiFX-2.6 released
A new stable major version of DiFX: DiFX-2.6.1 has been released.
The source code can be obtained via SVN at: https://svn.atnf.csiro.au/difx/master_tags/DiFX-2.6.1 .
Documentation can be found at the DiFX Wiki: https://www.atnf.csiro.au/vlbi/dokuwiki/doku.php/difx/start
Visit by colleagues from Beijing Aerospace Control Center
On 22 August 2019, four colleagues from the Beijing Aerospace Control Center (BACC) visited us at TU Wien to inform each other about research focus points and to discuss possible future co-operation activities.
VSC-4 powered on
In June 2019, the Vienna Scientific Cluster 4 was powered on. This is very good news, because we will have 10 private nodes (480 cores in total) and 1 PByte of storage for correlation activities. Also the Standard (Austrian newspaper) reports about VSC4.
Paper on VieSched++ published
A paper on “VieSched++: A New VLBI Scheduling Software for Geodesy and Astrometry” by Schartner and Böhm was published in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. It will serve as reference for the new scheduling software.