Simulating full-sky interferometric observations

TL;DR

This paper develops a full-sky interferometric simulation method using wavelets, enabling efficient, accurate, and computationally feasible high-resolution sky observations for instruments like the SKA.

Contribution

It introduces a novel fast wavelet-based approach for simulating full-sky interferometric visibilities without tangent plane approximations, significantly reducing computational costs.

Findings

Fast wavelet method is three times faster than traditional methods at low resolution.

High-resolution simulations with the wavelet method are over ten times faster.

The method maintains negligible error while enabling feasible high-resolution full-sky simulations.

Abstract

Aperture array interferometers, such as that proposed for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), will see the entire sky, hence the standard approach to simulating visibilities will not be applicable since it relies on a tangent plane approximation that is valid only for small fields of view. We derive interferometric formulations in real, spherical harmonic and wavelet space that include contributions over the entire sky and do not rely on any tangent plane approximations. A fast wavelet method is developed to simulate the visibilities observed by an interferometer in the full-sky setting. Computing visibilities using the fast wavelet method adapts to the sparse representation of the primary beam and sky intensity in the wavelet basis. Consequently, the fast wavelet method exhibits superior computational complexity to the real and spherical harmonic space methods and may be performed at substantially lower computational cost, while introducing only negligible error to simulated visibilities. Low-resolution interferometric observations are simulated using all of the methods to compare their performance, demonstrating that the fast wavelet method is approximately three times faster that the other methods for these low-resolution simulations. The computational burden of the real and spherical harmonic space methods renders these techniques computationally infeasible for higher resolution simulations. High-resolution interferometric observations are simulated using the fast wavelet method only, demonstrating and validating the application of this method to realistic simulations. The fast wavelet method is estimated to provide a greater than ten-fold reduction in execution time compared to the other methods for these high-resolution simulations.