12. Amplitude and Flux Calibration

Anne Dutrey$^{1,2}$

Anne.Dutrey@obs.ujf-grenoble.fr

$^1$ IRAM, 300 rue de la Piscine, F-38406 Saint Martin d'Hères, France

$^2$ LAOG, BP53, F-38041 Grenoble Cedex 9, France

You can also download a Compressed Postscript and a PDF version of this lecture

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...All of them are varying in time. 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 which gives the absolute scale of the data
3. The temporal amplitude calibration of interferometric data