Project:	Quality Assessment of skydata from the OVRO-LWA Radio Telescope
Disciplines:	Astronomy, Data Science
Mentor:	Gregg Hallinan, Professor of Astronomy; Director of OVRO, (PMA), gh@astro.caltech.edu
AO Contact:	Nivedita Mahesh, nmahesh@caltech.edu
Background:	Owens Valley Radio Observatory- Long Wavelength Array is a low frequency (20-87MHz) radio interferometer near Bishop, California. This radio telescope is built to observe our sky at long wavelengths to primarily shed light on the cosmology of our early universe and to look for radio auroral emissions from magnetospheres of exoplanets. The telescope has collected on the order of 100s of hours of data this past observing season (2023-2024). The selected student will work with this data and access its quality for the science cases intended.
Description:	The exciting thing about the project is the student will get an opportunity to work with actual sky data from a world leading radio telescope. The student will use the standard pipeline in place to process the raw data from the array and make images of the sky. They will inspect the outputs of each processing step, carry out analysis and access the quality of the data. A few quality assessment analysis will include: 1.) Check for the flagging occupancy after the flagging step. 2.) Estimate the effects of weather changes on the data using the meta information saved with each file. 3.) Assess the gain solutions after calibration step 4.) Image based Q&A on the daily images of the sky
References:	OVRO-LWA: https://www.ovro.caltech.edu/projects
Student Requirements:	Applicants should be proficient in Python and know basic statistics on the level of understanding distributions and basic linear fitting. Applicants need not possess experience with radio astronomy, but interest in physics and astronomy is encouraged.
Programs:	This AO can be done under the following programs:   Program    Available To        SURF    Caltech students only  Click on a program name for program info and application requirements.