WIDE-FIELD WIDE-BAND INTERFEROMETRIC IMAGING: THE WB A-PROJECTION AND HYBRID ALGORITHMS

Variations of the antenna primary beam (PB) pattern as a function of time, frequency, and polarization form one of the dominant direction-dependent effects at most radio frequency bands. These gains may also vary from antenna to antenna. The A-Projection algorithm, published earlier, accounts for the effects of the narrow-band antenna PB in full polarization. In this paper, we present the wide-band A-Projection algorithm (WB A-Projection) to include the effects of wide bandwidth in the A-term itself and show that the resulting algorithm simultaneously corrects for the time, frequency, and polarization dependence of the PB. We discuss the combination of the WB A-Projection and the multi-term multi-frequency synthesis (MT-MFS) algorithm for simultaneous mapping of the sky brightness distribution and the spectral index distribution across a wide field of view. We also discuss the use of the narrow-band A-Projection algorithm in hybrid imaging schemes that account for the frequency dependence of the PB in the image domain.