10. Amplitude and Flux Calibration

Anne Dutrey

IRAM, 300 rue de la Piscine, F-38406 Saint Martin d'Hères

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Calibration compensates for imperfections and unknowns in the instrument use, including antenna defects (surface quality, focus), pointing errors, atmospheric transmission and fluctuations, receiver and backend gain and instabilities, etc.... In addition, calibrated data are also expressed in a reliable physical unit.

This lecture is then cut in three parts, of equal importance:

1.

The single-dish calibration of the amplitude: its errors and biases

2.

The flux density calibration

3.

The final amplitude calibration of interferometric data