Note on Calibrators for the LBA ------------------------------- Basically there are two kinds of (total flux) calibrators in VLBI: 1) FRINGE FINDERS: which are strong sources near the source of interest to estimate delay and rate errors due to correlator model errors other than source position. Particularly handy to correct large clock errors. LBA staff will help you with this when preparing the observing schedule with you. Meanwhile the ICRF (International Celestial Reference Frame) sources at http://rorf.usno.navy.mil/rrfid.shtml and http://www.vlba.nrao.edu/astro/calib/ are, potentially, a good list of such calibrators. NOTE 1: Souces categorised as "(D)efining are likely to be best but (C)andidate will usually be fine. NOTE 2: Structure Index (in column 3) is described as below: "Fey and Charlot 1997 define a source "structure index" based on the median of the calculated structure corrections. They suggest that this index can be used as an estimate of the astrometric quality of the sources as follows: Sources with an X-band structure index of 1 may be considered very good astrometric sources. Sources with an X-band index of 2 may be considered good sources, while sources with an X-band index of 3 should be considered marginal (and should only be used with caution). Finally, sources with an X-band index of 4 should not be used at all for astrometric work. In addition, sources should have an S-band structure index of either 1 or 2, with a preferred value of 1, regardless of the value of their X-band structure index." 2) PHASE REFERENCING: where observations of a calbrator source are interleaved with those of the target. Then fringe fit solutions for the calibrator source can be used to calibrate delay, rate and phase residuals of the target. For this to work the structure of the calibrator source must be known before fringe fitting (so that the effects of structure can be removed). Currently we do not have this information so if you wish to do phase referencing you will first have to do an experiment to go looking for suitable calibrators in the part of the sky your target is located. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Updated 06-feb-2009