[mmaimcal] June report

[Al Wootten]

Thanks for your contributions, folks.  Please correct/comment on this asap.

Thanks,
Al

Report from Imaging and Calibration on June 2000 Work

Wootten updated the ALMA powerpoint presentations, giving them at
the Piedmont Virginia Technology Council, the
U. of Florida and the Interferometry School in Socorro.  He also worked
on updating the brochure.  Meetings of the ASAC were held, as well as
the Configuration group, the SSR and the weekly ALMA/US Imaging and Calibration 
Group.  He wrote summary of ALG issues for the ASAC, as well as
a response to the JRDG proposed receiver specifications and the SSR queries.
Wootten visited A. Harris and others at U. Md. to familiarize himself with
BIMA developments, and with progress of the water vapor radiometry efforts
within the MDC.  He also visited the AOC, where the ImCal meeting was held,
as well as discussions with Cornwell and others on AIPS++ and ALMA.

Development of a calibration plan continued, the plan to be presented shortly.
Mangum continued to investigate the amplitude calibration problem, along
with Dick Plambeck of the JRDG.  They will shortly present a calibration method
which should allow ALMA to achieve the 1% amplitude calibration
specification suggested by the ASAC.  He also continued to work on
pointing requirements for the ALMA antenna, including further testing
of optical pointing on the NRAO 12m antenna.  He also attended the 
Vertex antenna PDR in Duisburg, Germany as representative of the
Calibration and Imaging Group.

Site activities continued, despite the winter months in Chile.
Radford visited the Chajnantor site to upgrade, repair and replace
equipment.  No data exist on the atmospheric structure during the southern
hemisphere winter, so six radiosondes were launched, on various days.
Owing to a shortage of parts, the ALMA/US interferometer is now running
with the ALMA/EU 183 GHz radiometers, with which they are aligned.
He also attended the Cornell-Texas workshop on a 15m infrared telescope
for the Atacama site.  In Tucson, Radford worked on updating the ALMA
atmospheric statistics with new data from Chajnantor, the nutator design,
and refined site position information from GPS. Radford completed Memo 312, 
Refined Position of ALMA Equipment on Chajnantor,
and Memo 314, Underground Temperature Fluctuations and Water Drainage at
Chajnantor.  Butler gave a presentation on planetary aspects of
interferometric imaging to the summer school in Socorro.

Configuration efforts also are approaching a final state.
Yun updated the Project Book Chapter 15 and finished a complete design report
for the donut/double ring ALMA configuration, as well as producing a WEB page 
for the simulation image library for the configuration
study, complete with the links to the FITS format test images.  Conway
reports nearing a final design for his zoom array concept, also, and
at the configuration meeting this month the process of simulating observations
with the two designs was discussed, the process to begin shortly.  
Yun gave a presentation on "ALMA Science Issues" to the NRAO User
Committee and attended the Deep Millimeter Surveys conference at U Mass.
There, he presented a talk on using the whole radio to dust SED to infer 
the redshifts.  He reports that there is a growing realization that, of
instruments to be built capable of imaging the deep millimeter sky over the
next few years, only ALMA has the resolution to overcome confusion.
Yun then moved on towards production of a resolution of issues surrounding
the Ultracompact Array.  He compared using the UVCON program in AIPS,
updated by Kogan to include simulation of the impact of pointing errors on
imaging, to examine the performance of an array of 6m and 12m telescopes.