Quality Control Antonia Rowlinson and Gijs Molenaar 

Making bad images is easy... 

...but ruin transient searches An extreme example with the lightcurve of 3C295 before and after removal of bad images... Time Time 

Bad images cause: Inaccurate source fluxes Large position offsets Elliptical restoring beams which can make source association difficult Artifacts in images 

Problem: Too many images to check by eye... Need automated quality control within the TraP that can quickly identify bad images and skip over them in the following processing steps 

Pointing direction issues Problems may occur if pointing direction is near: A-team sources - need demixing Sun - e.g. solar flares Galactic plane - source confusion Other things that might be important: Time of day - particularly for LBA Low elevation - prone to more RFI Lack of sources in skymodel - not an issue if using a calibrator = Version 1 First identified and studied by A. Stewart & R. Breton (MSSS report week 41 and talk yesterday) 

Flagging Too much data is flagged: total - likely to be suffering from severe RFI particular baselines - causes poor uv coverage particular station types - causes poor uv coverage = Version 1 See work by Y. Cendes for more details about flagging and transient searches 

Calibration Primary beam problems Amplitude spikes Zero amplitude baselines Bad weight spectrum values Features in images such as stripes due to bad calibration - possibly use the stripy image detection script developed for MSSS = Version 1 MSSS report Week 42: R. Breton, D. Carbone, V. Heeson 

Imaging RMS noise in centre of image: RMS significantly above/below the theoretical noise Restoring beam: Beam undersampled or significantly oversampled Beam highly elliptical = Version 1 Already Im plem ented in TraP Over sampled Under sampled Normal 

Flux scale and positions Use the brightest catalogued sources to check flux scale and position offsets Extract brightest sources from image Basic source association using the beam FWHM and sky model Calculate average position offset - systematic position errors Calculate average flux ratio - incorrect flux scale in image = Version 1 MSSS report Week 28: A. Rowlinson 

Source extraction Source finder problems include: Large errors on gaussian fits FWHM of fit is smaller than restoring beam Spectrum unrealistic Not flagging sources in the catalogue but when they are extracted, therefore thresholds are all user defined = Version 1 

Transient Specific Relative to bright sources: Specific transient is very close to a bright source Over density of transients close to bright sources - further study required At peaks in the PSF for bright sources Systematic effects: Specific transient is very close to image edge Over density of transients near image edge or with specific RA/ Dec - further study required = Version 1 

These tests should mean all our images will look like: 

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