Sky reconstruction for the Tianlai cylinder array

Abstract

We apply our sky map reconstruction method for transit type interferometers to the Tianlai cylinder array. The method is based on spherical harmonic decomposition, and can be applied to a cylindrical array as well as dish arrays and we can compute the instrument response, synthesized beam, transfer function and noise power spectrum. We consider cylinder arrays with feed spacing larger than half a wavelength and, as expected, we find that the arrays with regular spacing have grating lobes which produce spurious images in the reconstructed maps. We show that this problem can be overcome using arrays with a different feed spacing on each cylinder. We present the reconstructed maps, and study the performance in terms of noise power spectrum, transfer function and beams for both regular and irregular feed spacing configurations.