The ATNF Facilities are used to monitor radio sources over weeks, months, years and even decades. The ATCA can rapidly respond to a source varying and can monitor the changes over a wide-range of observing frequencies. The LBA allows us to monitor changes with high angular resolution and Murriyang is renowned for long-term monitoring of pulsars and masers. We also carry out long-term monitoring observations of background radio sources (such as AGN and pulsars) to study space weather.
Capabilities
| Facility | Capabilities |
| ASKAP | The ASKAP Guest Science proposals enable the long-term monitoring of specific sources using the continuum or spectral line observing modes. Interplanetary scintillation observations are used to monitor space weather. |
| ATCA | Regular observations with the ATCA provides the flux densities and calibrator properties reported in the calibrator database. The ATCA has the capability for the long-term monitoring of radio sources with a rapid response to variations in a source to wide bandwidth monitoring observations over years. |
| Murriyang | Murriyang has ongoing projects to monitor pulsars and masers over long durations. Data products from the long-term pulsar projects are recorded in the Data Archive (DAP) with the project codes: P455: Long term monitoring of the double pulsar P456: The Parkes Pulsar Timing Array project, observing millisecond pulsars since 2004 P574: Young pulsar monitoring Murriyang can also be used to observe sources (such as pulsars) with lines-of-sight passing close to the Sun. Such observations are used to monitor the solar wind. |
| LBA | The LBA has been used for long-term monitoring of the structure and evolution of jets in Active Galactic Nuclei. Multi-epoch observations have been made to determine parallaxes and proper motions of Galactic masers and pulsars. |
