Over the past 5 years, we have been building an add-on facility to LOFAR called AARTFAAC. Its purpose is to monitor the full sky over Exloo in low LOFAR low band (~30-80 MHz) at cadences as high as 1 image/second in order to search for bright, short-duration transients. AARTFAAC is now operational in its first version, and based on various informal responses from colleagues we have reason to believe that AARTFAAC in its present form, or with extended capabilities, may be useful to quite a few of our colleagues.
In order to present AARTFAAC's current capabilities to a select group of colleagues and solicit ideas on how to make AARTFAAC or AARTFAAC++ useful to as many different science cases as possible, we will hold a small workshop (up to 50 participants). The goal is fourfold:
We are in the process of putting together documentation and other materials that describe the current state and capabilities of AARTFAAC. If you are interested in joining us, please send a brief expression of interest to aartfaacteam@gmail.com, in which you indicate what topics you would like to bring to our workshop for discussion. We hope to be able to accommodate as many interested colleagues, of course, but the discussion format of the workshop may require us to perform some selection.
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