Capabilities of Rapthor

Rapthor corrects for direction-dependent effects in HBA LOFAR data, including ionospheric effects and beam-model errors. These corrections are essential to obtaining instrumental-noise limited (~ 0.1 mJy/beam for an 8-hour observation), high-resolution (~ 5 arcsec FWHM) images. Rapthor can perform both full-field and target-only processing. Full-field processing is recommended if you want to image the full field or do not have a sky model of sufficient quality for field subtraction. If you have a good sky model of the field already, Rapthor can subtract off the field sources and do self calibration on the targets only (and/or provide calibrated data for each target for imaging or self calibration outside of Rapthor).