Speaker
Description
One of the major priorities of international radio astronomy is to study the early
universe through the detection of the 21 cm HI line from the Epoch of Reionisation
(EoR). Due to the weak nature of the 21 cm signal, an important part in the detection of the EoR is removing contaminating foregrounds from our observations as they are multiple orders of magnitude brighter. One method to achieve this is through the generation of sky maps spanning a wide range of frequencies and angular scales to filter out these contaminants. Complementing the existing low-frequency sky maps, we have constructed a Southern Sky map with the Engineering Development Array (EDA2), one of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) prototype systems. This is achieved through spherical harmonic transit interferometry; employing the m-mode formalism. Our results show that we can accurately map emissions on a multitude of angular scales by constraining the parameters in generating the spherical harmonic modes. This sky map is the first in a series of SKA precursor sky maps and serves as an initial step towards the creation of a well constrained and characterised diffuse foreground model.
