During the period from October 17th to November 11th, the staff of the VIRAC were at the Netherland Institute for Radio Astronomy ASTRON (Dvingen, Netherlands). The goal of this trip was to engage VIRAC staff in the low-frequency radio astronomy network’s LOFAR data processing project.

Since the VIRAC has not been involved in such projects so far, and LOFAR is a new generation of radio telescope, the knowledge gained in practice is the qualitative development of the VIRAC competences and the promotion of the growth of Latvian science in the completely new radio astronomy field – the data processing process of data observation LOFAR or data reduction. The reduction of LOFAR data uses both traditional radio astronomy data reduction methods and new methods – the best methods for LOFAR data processing and how to effectively implement them are still being sought.

In practice, VIRAC employees have mastered the new way of implementing the LOFAR data reduction method using so-called prefactor data pre-processing step on a server that was not previously used for this purpose. After two weeks of work, after mastering the software, configuring the server, editing PYTHON scripts and preparing LOFAR data, obtained the first so-called draft or preview images. Although the resulting images are not good enough to be used for scientific purposes (for analysis and conclusions), they provide important information about the quality of the data processed in the observations. Moreover, the acquisition of images can be considered as the first success in automation of the LOFAR data processing process, which will facilitate the future quality image acquisition process.

The work is planned to continue to produce better quality images using observations from all LOFAR stations, which is free from disturbances, in order to prepare information for a research article about the objects under study in the project – the FRII radio galaxies.