Apertif drift scan based compound beam maps (1130-1430 MHz)

Apertif (APERture Tile In Focus) is a Phased Array Feed (PAF) system on the Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope (WSRT) that conducted the Apertif legacy surveys between the 1st of July 2019 and the 28th of February 2022. Apertif carried out a two tiered imaging survey, with a shallow, wide-area and a medium-deep, small-area component, and a time domain survey. In the standard observing mode for imaging 40 partially overlapping compound beams (CBs) are formed simultaneously in a rectangular configuration. Each of these 40 CBs have a unique shape that differs substantially from the "old" WSRT beam shape.

This data set contains Apertif drift scan based CB maps measured at the first Apertif imaging survey frequency setting (1130-1430 MHz). Apertif imaging observations were take at these frequencies between July 2019 and January 2021. The CB maps are generated from drift scan observations using the AperPB scrips (DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6544109). These CB maps can be used to primary beam correct or mosaic images or data cubes from the Apertif imaging surveys.

The dataset contains two types of fits files:

1) Reconstructed CB maps from the drift scans. These maps are within directories called "drift_maps" and have the following naming scheme: <source>_<CB map ID>_<CB number>_<polarisation>.fits. The source refers to the continuum source used for the drift scan observations, this can be either CygA or CasA. The CB map ID is the identification of a set of CB maps based on the observing date in the format of yymmdd e.g. 190628. The CB number refers to which of the 40 Apertif CBs the map presents (numbering from 00 to 39). Polarisation denotes which polarisation the map shows, these can be xx, yy, I and diff, where diff refers to xx-yy. These maps are 3.36 × 2.3 deg in size and are oriented upside down compared to the sky.

2) Spline fitted CB maps. These are within directories called "beam_models" and have the following naming: <CB map ID>_<CB number>_<polarisation>_model.fits. The CB map ID is the identification of a set of CB maps based on the observing date e.g. 190628. The CB number refers to which of the 40 Apertif CBs the map presents. Polarisation denotes which polarisation the map shows, these can be xx, yy, I. These maps are 1.1 × 1.1 deg in size and are subdivided into 18 frequency bins in directories called "channel_<num>". These maps are suitable for primary beam correcting or mosaicing Apertif images and data cubes. Since the CB shapes of Apertif change over time, we recommend to use the closest CB data set in time to the observation that the primary beam correction or mosaicing is going to be applied to. 

Wit the exception of two datasets (191008 and 191023), all CB data sets also contain per antenna CB maps and spline fitted CB maps within the directory "per_antenna_maps". The naming and organisation of the per antenna maps is the same as described above, with the exception that the spline fitted CB maps are not subdivided by frequency bins into separate directories, but are contained within a single fits file. The Apertif system uses 12 of the 14 WSRT antennas. In some cases one or two antennas were malfunctioning during the observations and there are only 10 or 11 per antenna CB map sets. 

Notes on the individual CB data sets:

For a detailed description of the characteristics of the Apertif CBs and how the CB maps are produced see the upcoming publication Dénes et al. 2022 submitted to A&A (ArXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.09662).

For more information on the Apertif system see: van Cappellen et al. 2022, A&A, 658, 146 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202141739