The Chilbolton dish

Another photograph from the Observatory at Chilbolton. This time a close-up view of the 25m dish. This system operates as a weather radar and is also used for satellite tracking projects.

The 25m dish at Chilbolton. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

Wildflowers at UK608

This weekend I made a visit to the LOFAR station in the United Kingdom (UK608, Chilbolton) in order to work on various station calibration things for both KAIRA and LOFAR generally. While there, I went out to the field itself to see the antennas. Being at the height of the British summer (which lasts for 3-4 days on average), there were plenty of wild flowers in bloom, including some near and on the array itself.

Wild poppies near the LBA aerials. In the background is the 25m dish (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

More wildflowers near the aerials. Does anyone know what they are? (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

KAIRA beamlet statistics plotting programme

During the summer months, Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory runs a student/worker programme, which gives an opportunity to youngsters to gain valuable work experience (and earn a bit of money too). One of our summer workers this year, was Taavi Vierinen, who we asked to take on a task of writing some software to merge and plot KAIRA beamlet statistics (BST) files.

Taavi accomplished this task very well and produced an excellent result. He also learned a lot in the process, not just about KAIRA and our geophysics, but also about programming and software engineering techniques. (He also taught us a thing or two!).

Today was Taavi's last day at the observatory. Before departing, he wrote this small report, in addition to the rest of the software documentation, which we are including as today's KAIRA web log post.

Taavi writes about his software:

This program combines two BST files into a single one, the program can also be used to plot an image from a single file. Data taken from the two files is controlled by user input, giving the program time from last N seconds as variable. The program then detects the relevant files and takes copies the data, amount specified by the given time from the chronologically first file, if it doesn't have enough data, the program then continues to second file and copies the remainder from there. If there is no file from the day specified, the program will use file filled with 'scrap data' to create empty data in its place, the scrap data is one hour of information copied from a random BST file repeated 24 times to get 24 hours amount of data. If neither of the two files is found, the program will still plot an image, but it will be fully black graph representing that there is no data from given period.

Sample plots... click to enlarge. (Image: T. Vierinen)

After the temporary file is created, the code made by Derek kicks in and uses the data to create a graph. Only changes I made there were few lines of code that would draw a black box on the scrap data and one that draws a line to position where the data from different files meet, so it is easier to see from which day the data originally came.

In the screenshot there are images which were drawn by the program: reference (1), (2) and (3).

• In reference(1) you can see what is drawn when both of the relevant files are found, if data from only a single file is used, the image will be similar, but it won't have the white line as there is only a single file as its source.
• In reference(2) you can see what the image looks like when the latest file doesn't exist. The program draws black box in its place, for 24 hours worth of samples.
• In reference(3) the situation is reversed from reference(2), this time the oldest of the two wanted files doesn't exist, note that in both reference(2) and reference(3), the white line separating the data from different source can be seen.

The program was created using python 2.7.5, by both me, Taavi Vierinen, and Derek McKay-Bukowski. I enjoyed this project, because I managed to learn a lot of skills from it, from using python to managing what I did on my spare time. The project was good to me in many ways and it wasn't too easy either, nor too difficult!

-Taavi Vierinen

Thanks for all your efforts Taavi and well done on the project. Have a safe trip back down south and we wish you all the best.

To you, and all our readers, have a nice weekend!

The LOFAR logo

We all know the LOFAR logo...

But who remembers the old one? There used to be an old logo that was used for the LOFAR project. In fact, it can still be found in a few places. And one of these are the front panels of the receiver units.

This photograph is a close-up of one of those in the RF-container of KAIRA.

Close-up of the KAIRA RCU subrack (Photo: J. Keskitalo)

ASTRON JIVE daily image

KAIRA has yet again featured on the ASTRON/JIVE daily image. Yesterday, a montage of the official opening was shown, along with a description of the event and thanks to all our friends (especially those from LOFAR/ASTRON who have helped make the project a success so far.

The ASTRON/JIVE daily image provides an update every weekday with highlights related to our field of radio astronomy and the work of ASTRON, JIVE, LOFAR and other related projects. KAIRA has now featured four times on the site:

• 14-Jul-2011
• 20-Jul-2011
• 23-Feb-2012
• 02-Jul-2013.

Note you can also follow the daily image on Twitter: @daily_image

Link:  http://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/index.html?main.php?date=20130702

SpacePy

SpacePy is a package for Python specifically for those working in the space sciences. It provides a set of tools which build on the well-established NumPy and MatPlotLib packages, to make data analysis, modelling and visualisation easier. The project web site lists the following benefits of this toolkit:

• Quickly obtain data
• Create publications quality plots
• Perform complicated analysis easily
• Run common empirical models
• Change coordinates effortlessly
• Harness the power of Python

To quote further from the SpacePy website:

"The SpacePy project seeks to promote accurate and open research standards by providing an open environment for code development. In the space physics community there has long been a significant reliance on proprietary languages that restrict free transfer of data and reproducibility of results. By providing a comprehensive, open-source library of widely-used analysis and visualization tools in a free, modern and intuitive language, we hope that this reliance will be diminished."

More details are available from the SpacePy website at:  http://spacepy.lanl.gov/

Multi-lingual

We start the week with a photograph of the KAIRA information sign. It was put up on the side of the HBA for the official opening, but will later be moved so that the public can easily view it. It has a short description of the project... in six languages!

The KAIRA information sign. (Photo: D. McKay-Bukowski)

The languages are: Finnish, Sami, Swedish, Norwegian, German and English.