Staff changes

Allegro’s newest members are postdocs Pascal Keller and Joshiwa van Marrewijk!

Pascal Keller joined Allegro in May 2024. He did his PhD titled “Investigating the Epoch of Reionisation with Radio Interferometers” at the Cavendish Astrophysics group of the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on developing and applying non-standard analysis techniques to radio interferometric data. He is particularly interested in using calibration-insensitive closure invariants such as the “closure phase” to search for the redshifted 21 cm signal of neutral hydrogen during the Epoch of Reionisation (EoR). As part of his thesis, he applied the “closure phase method” to data from the Hydrogen Epoch of Reionization array (HERA), producing robust upper limits on the spatial fluctuations of the EoR signal.

Joshiwa van Marrewijk will join Allegro in October 2024. He did his PhD at ESO in Garching, titled “The birth of cosmic structures as revealed by observations in the (sub-)mm bands”. His research focuses on how galaxies and galaxy clusters form, particularly at two key moments in cosmic history: the epoch of reionization and protoclusters. During his PhD, Joshiwa developed innovative methods to analyse ALMA data in the uv-plane and created a novel simulation tool named maria used for forecasting bolometric single-dish observations and studying phase fluctuations caused by the ever-changing atmosphere.  While his work often reveals the challenges of pushing observations to extreme redshifts, it’s also paving the way for the next generation of (sub-)mm astronomy and provides useful tools to analyse to get the best science out of the observations.

Meanwhile, we said good-bye Dr. Ko-Yun (Monica) Huang this summer. We would like to express our gratitude to Monica for her amazing service at Allegro! We will miss her greatly, and wish her all the best on her new path!

 

Lastly, we are excited that Dr. Violette Impellizzeri will join ASTRON as head of the Astronomy & Operations department. She started her new duties at ASTRON on 1 September 2024, but will still be working at the Allegro ARC Node partially until March 2025, to enable a smooth transition for the new group, new arrivals and daily activities. At ASTRON, Violette will be closely involved in the commissioning efforts for LOFAR2.0, the deployment of the SKA Dutch regional center and astronomy research activities at the institute.

Violette  has been part of ALMA since 2011, when she relocated to the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) in Chile as a commissioning postdoc and science fellow. Her involvement during the commissioning phase included early VLBI testing, science verification, and the implementation of high-frequency observing techniques, also known as band-to-band phase transfer. As operations commenced in 2014, she assumed the role of an operations astronomer with added responsibilities such as leading the Phase II Group (P2G), serving as a liaison for VLBI activities (VLBI friend of telescope), and heading the Proposal Handling Team (PHT). In October 2020, she joined the Allegro ARC Node in Leiden as the Program Manager, providing assistance to the ALMA community in the Netherlands.

Moving to ASTRON, Violette said she hopes she can help create further synergies and collaborations among our frequency domains in the coming years, as we are living through a transformation with the exciting WSU upgrade matching the ongoing constructions of SKA and the LOFAR 2.0 observatory.

Science Day: November 29, 2024

Allegro is pleased to announce our annual Science Day, which will take place at Leiden Observatory in our new Gorlaeus building on 29 November in BE.0.10. We would like to invite all members of our communities to present your latest scientific results obtained with ALMA at the event!

During the Science Day, we will also have talks related to ALMA technical aspects, news, and outlook—focusing on the changes that the Wide-band Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) will bring. We will discuss the resources that ALMA observers currently need (and anticipate needing), with a particular emphasis on Allegro’s role in supporting the community in the Netherlands.

Details on invited speakers and the program will be sent to our mailing list soon!

Initial registration can be completed here!

Four of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) antennae — 12 metres in diameter — line up against the night sky in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

EAS Meeting

In July the European ARC network set up a booth at the annual European Astronomical Society (EAS) meeting, where conference participants could pick up a variety of ALMA related stickers, watch an informative video about ALMA and the ARC network, or enjoy a casual chat with one of the ARC representatives. This was a great opportunity for the ARC network to promote its services to the astronomy community and spread excitement about ALMA science and developments.

Updates from the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade Workshop

In June ESO hosted a workshop focused on ALMA’s upcoming Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU). The workshop, titled “The promises and challenges of the ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade”, presented the upgrade and showcased the science that will be enabled in the upcoming years. It was also an opportunity to solicit input from the ALMA community that will be used to inform priorities during the commissioning phase.

In short, the WSU is well-underway and consists of an increase of the instantaneous spectral bandwidth by as much as a factor of four, while retaining full spectral resolution over the entire bandwidth. The result is an increase of the spectral scan speed up to a factor of 50 for the highest spectral resolution. In addition, an upgrade of the full signal chain of ALMA – from the receivers and digitizers, all the way through to the correlated data – will result in increases in sensitivity for all observations.

You can watch a video about the WSU here!

ALM Cycle 11 Proposal Submission Statistics

The ALMA Cycle 11 proposal submission statistics set some new records! Although the number of overall submitted proposals seems to be stabilising with 1712 proposals this semester, the number of hours requested on the 12-meter array continues to increase each cycle with over 30000 hours requested this cycle. The region with the highest number of proposals submitted was (again) Europe with a request of 11946 hours on the 12-m array, leading to the highest oversubscription of any region (over 8). East Asia and North America both had oversubscriptions of about 6.5, and Chile saw a big jump up in oversubscription which is now over 5. Band 6 remained the most popular this cycle, and Band 1 was requested by about 10% of proposals in its debut cycle.

The percentages of proposals for the 12-m array per region, science category, and requested receiver band for regular proposals are shown in the figure below.

42 large programs were submitted, of which four were awarded: two in the Circumstellar Disks, Exoplanets, and the Solar System category; and two in the Cosmology and High Redshift Universe category.

In Cycle 11, 60 proposals were submitted from the Netherlands. From these, 16 were accepted with an A, B or C rating. Worldwide, Netherlands-based astronomers were involved in 103 accepted proposals representing close to 2000 hours of ALMA time. This includes 16 researchers as PI and 106 individuals as co-I.

More details on the submission statistics can be found here.

European ALMA School

In June the European ALMA regional center organised the first European ALMA school, hosted by the UK regional node in Manchester. The school was a full week of lectures and hands-on activities related to interferometry, and ALMA specifically. Topics ranged from calibration techniques, to the specifics of the products that ALMA delivers, to an overview of the science that’s been done with ALMA over its 10-year lifespan. On top of the lectures, there was a visit to Jodrell Bank Observatory. With about 70 participants, the school was a big success, and we are looking forward to planning similar events in the future!

CASA Training Event

Allegro will host a training event on 23 October introducing the software packages that are commonly used to work with ALMA data: CASA and CARTA. We will briefly introduce ALMA and Allegro, and start looking at ALMA data using these software packages. The aim of the workshop is to get researchers started using ALMA data, and to point them to the resources they’ll need once they embark on their own projects. The workshop is geared towards first time users of ALMA data.

Please let your students, especially ones starting ALMA-related projects, know about the workshop.

You can express interest using this link.

Recap on joint ALMA+JWST Science day in Groningen, January 2024

On January 30, 2024, Allegro – in collaboration with JWST colleagues – organized its first Netherlands JWST-Allegro Science Day at Kapteyn Institute, in Groningen. The Joint Science Day was inspired by the recent introduction of “Joint Proposals” at ALMA and other major observatories and was aimed to inspire collaborations while highlighting already existing scientific synergies.

The event was a great success, with ~ 50 registered participants and an incredible lineup of speakers presenting ALMA, JWST data but also in many cases both in the same talk. Talks ranged from astrochemistry, the high-z universe, to long baseline observations of gravitational lenses, and studies of nearby galaxies and planet forming disks.  Invited speakers were Prof. Karina Caputi (Kaptyen) and Dr. Łukasz Tychoniec (Leiden) who spoke about high redshift galaxies and proto-stellar systems, respectively, in both cases demonstrating the power of combining information from both instruments. Dr. Martin Zwaan (ESO) was invited to speak about ALMA news and the Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade (WSU) that has recently kicked off, offering a detailed timeline and explanation of upcoming capabilities.

Another great highlight of the day was the opportunity to visit the NOVA labs where the new ALMA Band 2 cartridges are currently being assembled. This was a very exciting opportunity for many students and postdocs to get in touch with the technology being developed in the Netherlands and was an inspirational demonstration of the many contributions from the Dutch community to ALMA. Finally, our Allegro-JWST Science Day was a great way to meet our colleagues from various institutes in person again, to chat over coffee and lunch about new ideas and future visions. We would like to thank Kapteyn for hosting, and all our participants for making it such a fun day!  

CASA logo

ALMA Data Reduction Training Day: November 27, 2023

On Monday, November 27, 2023, we will host an ALMA Data Reduction Training Day in-person in HL 111.

The training will begin at 9:30 AM and continue into the afternoon with coffee breaks and an hour lunch break. The Allegro team will be presenting a series of talks that cover the following topics: how to go from the archive to obtaining calibrated visibilities, overview for calibration and self-calibration, imaging, analysis tools and visualizing data with CARTA. There will be sufficient time for Question & Answer at the end of each talk.

Several of the talks will include a hands-on component that participants can follow along with. Information on how to connect to the Allegro workstations will be provided prior to the training day to the registered participants.

Registration is now closed!

Program* November 27, 2023
9:15-9:30 Welcome
9:30-10:15 Aida Ahmadi ALMA data: From the archive to calibrated visibilities
10:15-10:45 Violette Impellizzeri Overview of calibration and self-calibration
10:45-11:05 Coffee break
11:05-11:15 Aida Ahmadi Introduction to CASA + technical setup
11:15-12:15 Monica Huang Imaging & tclean
12:15-13:15 Lunch break
13:15-14:00 Monica Huang Imaging & tclean
14:00-14:30 Coffee break
14:30-15:30 Alex Hygate Analysis tools
15:30-16:30 Aida Ahmadi Intro to CARTA

* Note that this is a rough schedule as we plan to dedicate plenty of time for questions after each session.

Directions to Leiden Observatory

Note that this is not the old observatory in the center of Leiden. Instructions on how to get to Leiden Observatory, including transportation from Schiphol Airport or the central trains station, can be found here. Note that these instructions specify the route to the Lorentz Center, which is in the building on the right in the photo below (Oort building). The event will be held in the joining taller building –  Huygens building. Leiden Observatory is located on the 4-5th floors of both buildings, and the Allegro offices are located on the 11th floor of the Huygens building.

Locations inside the building

Workspaces reserved for the ALMA Data Reduction Training Day on November 27, 2023 are located in room HL-111 on the 1st floor of the Huygens building. There is a reception at the entrance of the building where they can provide you with directions.

lorentzcenter

IAU I-HOW Radio Astronomy Workshop

A joint Iran and Türkıye radio astronomy workshop is set to take place at Erciyes University in Kayseri in Türkıye in the next two weeks (Sep. 4-15). The workshop is part of the IAU Hands-On Workshops (I-HOW) initiative that aims to train young scientists in developing countries in accessing, analyzing and using the vast amounts of astronomical data currently available in archives for their research projects. The workshop will focus on teaching students and young researchers how to analyze radio data from arrays such as VLA, ALMA, MeerKAT, and LOFAR. The two-week workshop will provide ample time for lectures, tutorials, scientific talks of a wide range of topics, and hands-on projects. The students are also given an opportunity to present their own scientific works and request assistance on their own projects from the team of lecturers. Experts from Allegro as well as the Italian and UK ALMA Regional Centre Nodes will be at the workshop training students on how to access, calibrate, image, and analyze ALMA observations. For more information, see the website of I-HOW Radio Astronomy Workshop.