LTA account for new users

The lofar.astron.nl webpage is currently unavailable to general users. Users who need to create a new LTA account should request one via the SDC-Helpdesk. Please provide the following information to us to create an account, and grant it permissions to stage and download data from the archive:

• your title
• your preferred username
• email address (preferably institutional one)
• name (first name + surname)
• phone number
• name and address of institution/affiliation
• website/web address of affiliation
• position

Re-racking at CIT

We are busy preparing the server room at CIT in Groningen to be ready for future LOFAR 2.0 needs. We are currently working on upgrading the racks to host LOFAR 2.0 hardware in a more efficient way. All LOFAR systems must be removed from the racks and remounted in new racks. 

LOFAR2.0 commissioning

Work on the LOFAR2.0 telescope (construction, station commissioning, observatory commissioning, development and research) is ongoing and in full swing after the shutdown of the LOFAR1.0 production observations on August 31, 2024. At the Observatory commissioning division, we have identified three main areas (telescope, pipelines and operations). The community has the opportunity to join any of the workgroups that they find interesting or critical to their needs. There is a public Confluence page dedicated to these commissioning activities with links to the different commissioning teams where people can still sign up and join. Proposers of the LOFAR2.0 Large Programs, International stations teams, as well as other user community members, are encouraged to reach out. People with expertise and interests in LOFAR telescope, pipelines and operations are welcome to join and help build the LOFAR2.0 telescope we are aspiring for. See section Commissioning towards LOFAR2.0 on-sky, for commissioning updates.  

Data staging and downloading from the LTA sites

Data staging and downloads from the LTA sites were generally stable in the past few weeks, except for the few planned maintenance days where the services were unavailable. Planned maintenance days are always mentioned at the LTA portal. Please contact the SDC-Helpdesk if you are experiencing any issues with staging and downloads.

LOFAR Family Meeting 2025

The 2025 edition of the LOFAR Family Meeting will be held in Paris, France, in the week of 22-26 September. It will be hosted at the IPGP (Paris Institute of Planetary Physics), which is situated in the heart of the Latin Quarter in Paris, close to the Jardin des Plantes (Botanical Gardens). The meeting website is in preparation; further details, including the opening of the registration, will be circulated soon.

• New international stations will be built in Italy and Bulgaria in the coming years. Both stations will be equipped with LOFAR2.0 hardware; whose installation and rollout are expected in 2025 or early 2026.
• The LOFAR1.0 Dutch stations are currently shut down and are not used for production observations: they are being upgraded to LOFAR2.0 stations status. At the moment, CS001, CS032 and RS307 have LOFAR2.0 hardware installed. The international stations that still have LOFAR1.0 hardware have been handed over to the stations’ owners for their respective use cases.  

SDC program (J. Swinbank)

• The Rapthor development team has made huge progress in both scientific and computational performance of their pipeline for direction-dependent calibration and imaging of HBA-NL data. The results are now pushing the state of the art, and stand us in very good stead as we ramp up towards LOFAR2.0 data processing. See, for example, the image of 3C 61.1 attached; more details at https://www.astron.nl/dailyimage/main.php?date=20250113.

• The SDC team has also completed the “skeleton” of the all-new image-plane transients detection and monitoring pipeline (TraP). This builds on ideas developed in the LOFAR1 era by the Transients Key Science Project, but is being re-imagined and re-engineered to fully integrate with the LOFAR2.0 system. There is still a lot of work to be done to deliver an operational pipeline, but this initial engineering work demonstrates that we are off to a good start.
• The new proposal tool, TULP, has been in commissioning — in two ways. First, it itself is being commissioned, with a battery of tests being run against it, and a lot of essential feedback and suggestions for improvement flowing back to the developers. Also, it's actually being used to manage proposals for the rest of the commissioning effort — a real trial by fire!
• Work is now well underway to extend our bulk data processing system, originally developed in the context of the LDV project, to run across all the LTA sites. We are currently focused on using the infrastructure at Jülich, but expect to also begin rolling it out at Poznań before much longer. 

Commissioning towards LOFAR2.0 on-sky (M. Brentjens, R. Pizzo, Cees Bassa, Marco Drost, Boudewijn Hut, Marco Iacobelli, Emanuela Orru, Bernard Asabere and Tim Shimwell) )

The first two months of 2025 saw the first LOFAR-2.0 science requirements being tested!  Although these are still humble requirements, the significance is that they flowed through a normal proposal/observing work flow for the first time. They went from test plan to proposal to review in TULP (the proposal tool) to specification in TMSS to observing, science pipeline (pulp), inspection, and test report! 

We satisfy the requirement that we should be able to conduct observations with durations less than or equal to 1 minute. The limit we found is 3 seconds. The test report can be found here: 

https://support.astron.nl/confluence/display/L2COM/Commissioning+report+-+LOFAR2-814  

It is notable that this particular experiment was planned, executed, and reported on by our operator Henk Mulder, with some help from Vlad Kondratiev for the pulsar analysis. Thank you Henk and Vlad! 

In the mean time, all of the test plans for Array Release B have been finalized, and most of the test plans for Array Release C are in development. The stations will be under AIV control until Feb 28, after which they will be handed over to operations so we can work on commissioning the stations themselves, as well as the first major batch of DUPLLO science requirements. 

From Feb 25th until Mar 17th, there will be no access to the stations. In that time frame, the server room in which our CEP hardware is located, will be receiving a new floor and new server racks, requiring full dismantling and rebuilding of pretty much all central correlation, compute, and control infrastructure.