Guides & Tutorials
- Using Multiple NRAO Instruments
- Interferometry
- Very Long Baseline Interferometry
Processing Data from NRAO Telescopes
Welcome to the Data Processing Center. Here you will find the resources you need to understand the processes, techniques and software applications used to reduce and analyze data from NRAO telescopes.
Data from the Very Large Array, Green Bank Telescope, and the Midcourse Space Experiment (MSX) satellite reveal an enormous, nearly empty bubble blown into the disk of our Milky Way Galaxy by the force of the stellar wind and radiation from hot, massive stars and the explosive impact of dying stars (Credit: NRAO/AUI, J. English, J. Stil, R. Taylor, and MSX).
The NRAO strives to make its facilities available to all professional astronomers, not only experts in radio astronomy. To that end, maintaining and developing data analysis software, algorithm development tools, and automated data analysis pipelines for specific observing modes. End to end systems that allow non-specialists to specify their observations easily and have them taken, processed, and archived automatically are being incrementally developed for each of the telescopes, utilizing several common elements. These will gradually be phased in between 2008 and 2012. This will facilitate the multi-wavelength science and statistical astronomy that is advancing the field today.
NRAO aims to operate the GBT, EVLA, VLBA, and ALMA as a unified system of telescopes so that the scientific community can easily (1) access any of the suite of telescopes, (2) take advantage of the numerous NRAO services to the user community, (3) create state-of-the-art images from a combination of automated pipelines and expert assistance, and (4) get to work on writing the scientific papers. The calibrated data and images then will be stored in archives for continued scientific use by other astronomers, perhaps for scientific goals not envisioned by the original proposers.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.