BIWEEKLY CALENDAR OF THE ALMA PROJECT at NRAO 2 December 2008 - 16 December 2008 ******************************** THIS FORTNIGHT************************* With the accelerated schedule of the NRAO eNews there hasn't been enough time to continute the biweekly news at the same cadence as before. Therefore I will substitute text which appears with photos in the eNews at the appropriate fortnights. This is the slightly expanded December text as submitted. See http://www.nrao.edu/news/newsletters/enews/enews_1_7/enews_1_7.shtml ALMA Construction at the Operations Support Facility Eight Vertex antennas and four Mitsubishi Electric Company (Melco) antennas are now at the Operations Support Facility; major parts of the eighth Vertex antenna arrived on Thanksgiving Day. Tests continue on the antennas, with the first acceptance of an antenna, a Mitsubishi antenna, expected within days. Acceptance of the first Vertex antenna should follow shortly thereafter. On November 20, Lore, one of the mammoth antenna transporters, moved an assembled Vertex antenna from the Site Erection Facility building to an antenna foundation above the Operations Support Facility to await its tests. Figure 1 Antenna transporter Lore moves Vertex antenna past the OSF Technical Buildings to a site above it to await testing. See NRAO eNews. Early in December, the Annual ALMA External Review will be held at which an external panel will examine ALMA’s progress during the preceding year and plans for the next year. ALMA personnel have moved into offices in the new OSF Technical Building complex, and its teleconferencing facilities have been inaugurated. Figure 2 Work continues past sunset in the new OSF Technical Building, seen here just before drawing of the night shades. *************************************************************************** DAILY CALENDAR (Times EDT/EST ) see https://wikio.nrao.edu/bin/view/ALMA/AlmaCalendar ****************************** UPCOMING EVENTS ************************* Dec 9-11 ALMA Annual External Incremental Review OSF Dec 17-18 Acceptance procedures for Melco No 2 Dec 17 ASAC telecon Dec 18 ALMA Board telecon Dec 20 ALMA Test Facility closes Jan 26-27 CASA Tutorial, Santiago Jan 28-29 ASAC f2f meeting, OSF ******************************* TECHNICAL NEWS ************************* ALMA Memo 580 Frequency profile difference between ACA Correlator and 64-Antenna Correlator Authors: Kamazaki, T., Okumura, S. K., Chikada, Y. ACA Correlator and 64-Antenna Correlator adopt FX and XF architecture, respectively. This difference introduces different frequency responses between them. However, for combined imaging of the ACA and the 12m-Array data, their frequency profile compatibility is required, and one possible method is the convolution of weighting function in the frequency domain. We have studied this method and found that \u201ca XF frequency response convolved with Hanning window function\u201d is well synthesized by linear combination of \u201ctwelve FX frequency responses\u201d, when one frequency channel width of the 64-Antenna Correlator is two times as large as that of the ACA Correlator. Then, we have calculated frequency profiles by convolving synthesized and original frequency responses with several object profiles. The maximum profile difference between them is estimated to be small by 0.6 % or less except for the case of d function as an object profile. . View a pdf version of ALMA Memo #580 at: http://www.alma.nrao.edu/memos/html-memos/alma580/memo580.pdf *****************************ALSO OF INTEREST*************************** Several ALMA positions are available at NRAO. Example: The National Radio Astronomy Observatory invites applications for an ALMA Postdoctoral Fellow position with the Commissioning team in Chile. When completed in 2012, ALMA will be the most powerful (sub)millimeter interferometer ever constructed, and will transform our understanding of topics ranging from the formation of nearby protoplanetary disks to the earliest epochs of galaxy formation. This position is assigned to the ALMA project with operational duties in Chile. The position is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation through the ALMA Construction Project and as an international staff position will exist during the construction period through 2011. There may be possibilities to transfer to the observatory science operations team during or after construction. Details for all positions may be viewed at: http://members.aas.org/JobReg/JobDetailPage.cfm?JobID=25062 or http://www.nrao.edu/administration/personnel_office/careers.shtml#CV4917_ALMA_POSTDOC ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The US National Radioscience Meeting (USNC/URSI) meets in Boulder on 5-8 Jan 2009. Among the Commission J topics is a session on ALMA Technology, Science and Status. See: http://www.astro.caltech.edu/USNC-URSI-J/ for abstracts of this and other sessions. *************************************************************************** Please send information for upcoming calendars by Friday evening of the preceding biweekly period to Jennifer Neighbours or Al Wootten via e-mail (jneighbo at nrao.edu or awootten at nrao.edu). The calendar will be issued between late Friday and sometime on Monday by e-mail to all NRAO scientific staff members and anyone else interested. A specific mailing list, alma-info, has been created for anyone wishing to receive it. Past issues are available at http://www.cv.nrao.edu/~awootten/mmaimcal/ALMACalendars.html