Using the Sun to Measure the Primary Beam Response of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment

Abstract

We present a beam pattern measurement of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) made using the Sun as a calibration source. As CHIME is a pure drift scan instrument, we rely on the seasonal North-South motion of the Sun to probe the beam at different elevations. This semiannual range in elevation, combined with the radio brightness of the Sun, enables a beam measurement which spans ~7,200 square degrees on the sky without the need to move the telescope. We take advantage of observations made near solar minimum to minimize the impact of solar variability, which is observed to be <10% in intensity over the observation period. The resulting data set is highly complementary to other CHIME beam measurements -- both in terms of angular coverage and systematics -- and plays an important role in the ongoing program to characterize the CHIME primary beam.

11 pages, 9 figures, Accepted by ApJ

References in corpus (9)

• Array Programming with NumPy
• A bright millisecond-duration radio burst from a Galactic magnetar
• The First CHIME/FRB Fast Radio Burst Catalog
• Mitigating Internal Instrument Coupling for 21 cm Cosmology I: Temporal and Spectral Modeling in Simulations
• The UTMOST: A hybrid digital signal processor transforms the MOST
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Cited by in corpus (12)

• Detection of Cosmological 21 cm Emission with the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment
• The Second Radio Synchrotron Background Workshop: Conference Summary and Report
• An Injection System for the CHIME/FRB Experiment
• Limits on Fast Radio Burst-like Counterparts to Gamma-ray Bursts using CHIME/FRB
• Birth and Evolution of Fast Radio Bursts: Strong Population-Based Evidence for a Neutron-Star Origin
• Holographic Beam Measurements of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME)
• Beam Maps of the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment (CHIME) Measured with a Drone
• FAST Drift Scan Survey for HI Intensity Mapping. II. Stacking-based Beam Construction of the 19-feed Array at $1.4$ GHz
• Drone Beam Mapping of the TONE Radio Dish Array
• Measurement of the Primary Beam of the Tianlai Cylindrical Antenna Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
• An Overview of CHIME, the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment
• Forecasting Galaxy Cluster HI Mass Recovery with CHIME at Redshifts z = 1 and 2 via the IllustrisTNG Simulations