Report from ERIS 2013

Last week, the European Radio Interferometry School (ERIS2013) was held in the Netherlands. Our report is from Sari Lasanen (U. Oulu) who attended the event. Sari writes:

It's been a great week at ERIS 2013, the European radio interferometry summer school. This year, the school was hosted by ASTRON/JIVE at Dwingeloo in beautiful Netherlands. Being a mathematician, it wasn't just once or twice that I was asked why to attend a radio interferometry school.

Why indeed?

From the historical viewpoint we inverse problems researcher are greatly indebted to astronomy for the first examples of high impact discoveries from indirect and noisy data. After all, the least squares fitting was developed by C. F. Gauss in order to recover the orbits of heavenly bodies (like the asteroid Ceres) from inaccurate and overdetermined data. And just think about how the planet Neptune was discovered? Indirect data! Catching up with the modern tools of radio interferometry has been tremendously useful and fun. Not only have I learned what is going on in calibration and imaging but also what the big question in today's astronomy actually are. Surely you have heard about dark matter but what about re-ionisation? If not, google it at once. That's where lot of today's radio astronomy is happening.

ERIS2013 Group Photograph (ASTRON/JIVE)

Thanks, Sari, for the great report and for sending the meeting photograph, taken at the Westerbork Synthesis Array. As can be seen, the school was very well attended!

Link:  http://www.astron.nl/eris2013/

ERIS 2013

Registration for the 2013 European Radio Interferometry School – ERIS 2013 — is now open. This is the Fifth European Radio Interferometry School and it will take place in Dwingeloo (The Netherlands), in the week of 9-13 September 2013.  ERIS will provide a week of lectures and tutorials on how to get scientific results from radio interferometry. Topics covered include:

• Calibration and imaging of continuum, spectral line, and polarization data
• Low frequency (LOFAR domain), cm-wave (e-MERLIN domain), decimetre-wave (HI/OH domain), high frequency (ALMA/IRAM domain), and very long baseline interferometry
• Extracting the information from astronomical data and interpreting the results
• Choosing the most suitable array and observing plan for your project

A preliminary programme is posted on the ERIS webpage: http://www.astron.nl/eris2013/programme.php

Participants are expected to bring fairly recent Linux or MAC o/s laptops with tens GB disk space. Instructions for installing data reduction packages and downloading data will be provided nearer the time of the event. Most examples will be drawn from m-, cm-, and mm-wave instruments such as LOFAR, WSRT, JVLA, EVN, e-Merlin, and ALMA.

Registration will be open until April 1st 2013, although the conference organisers say that the event is likely to be very popular and that people should register as soon as possible to secure a place. http://www.astron.nl/eris2013/registration.php

Link: http://www.astron.nl/eris2013/