ARTS tracking beams

The Apertif Radio Transient System (ARTS) archive contains tied-array beam (TAB) data. The TABs have a time-dependent and frequency-dependent pointing. This tool is able to convert the TAB data to a tracking beam (TB), which tracks a fixed point on the sky over the course of an observation. Additionally, it can convert TAB data to Synthesised Beams (SBs), which are suitable for transient searches.

Installation and basic usage instructions are available at the project’s Github page.

This page contains a tutorial for both the tracking beams and synthesised beams. The required data can be downloaded from the Apertif Long Term Archive (ALTA). The arts_tools package provides an automated way to do so, and will be used in the tutorials.

The tracking beams track a single RA/Dec point, and are suitable for known pulsar or periodicity searches. The synthesised beams are broad-band and have a larger field-of-view than the tracking beams, but they have a time-dependent pointing. Hence, they are suitable for single-pulse searches or very short periodicity searches only.