LOFAR Operations

A. de Jong, W. Frieswijk, 
The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON)

LOFAR, the Low Frequency Array is a novel digital radio interferometer telescope designed, build and operated by ASTRON. Its main application area is astronomy in the relatively unexplored low frequency range from 10Mhz to 250MHz. To be able to observe at these low frequencies it uses thousands of small omni-directional antennas which are bundled in individual sensor stations. It currently consists of 45 of these sensor stations that are coupled via a proprietary high speed optical fiber data network. The core stations are situated on what is called the superterp near the village of Exloo in the Netherlands. Additional international stations are spread out over Germany(5), France(1), UK(1), and Sweden(1). Being spread out over these countries the telescope is capable of observing with baselines up to 1500 km.
The LOFAR software telescope can beam form up to hundreds of beams in real-time thus observing different sources at the same time. To operate this complex telescope specialized software is being developed in-house by ASTRON. These software packages are handling all operating stages from the submission of observing proposals to the actual definition, scheduling and operating of the telescope.