Practical Lessons from Low Frequency Imaging with the VLA

Abstract

Many lessons gained in imaging 74 and 330 MHz VLA data are of practical interest to future users of the GMRT and other low frequency observers. Three important issues are 1) radio frequency interference excision, 2) self-calibration, and 3) wide-field imaging. Recently developed tasks to address these and other problems encountered in low frequency VLA data reduction now exist or are being developed in both AIPS and AIPS++. We will describe how we use some of these new tools to routinely generate wide-field, low frequency images with sensitivities approaching thermal or classical confusion limits.