THE VLA CONTINUUM POLARIMETRY DATA SET: JUPITER & MARS
                            (Greg Taylor)

    These observations were taken with the VLA in the D-configuration
at 6 cm on March 19, 1999.  They are part of Rick Perley's
multi-frequency monitoring of the VLA flux density scale.

    The data reduction for this project can be divided into three
stages - (1) calibrating the raw multi-source VLA data; (2)
self-calibrating the source data; and (3) making total intensity and
polarization images of the fully calibrated data.

Stage 1.  The Raw Uncalibrated Data: 

The multi-source file FLUX99-6CM.C BAND contains observations of the
absolute flux density calibrator (1331+305), some secondary and
polarization calibrators (0137+331, 0521+166, and 0542+398), and some
target sources (planets, 0437+296, and a couple others).  There are 2
IFs, 4885 and 4835 MHz, each with both right and left circular
correlator products.  The data have not been flagged or processed in
any way.  For those that want to skip the flagging of the data, the FG
table can be copied from FLUX99-6CM.CALTAB.

Stage 2. The Calibrated Data:

The single-source data file JUPITER.TBC0 contains the calibrated data
SPLIT off from the multi-source database described above after the
initial phase, amplitude, and polarization calibration.  Jupiter is a
nice strong source, so self-calibration is no problem.  As a plot of
the amplitude with u-v distance will reveal, the source looks rather
like a disk, but with complications!  The first step in
self-calibration can be either with a first iteration image as the
model, or with a point-source model used with the shorter spacings.
If may prove instructive to compare the final results after starting
with each of these methods.  I got a dynamic range of 1500, see
if you can do better.  Are we reaching the thermal noise?

Stage 3. Imaging the Data:

The single source file JUPITER.TBC3 contains the self-calibrated
data.  There have been 2 phase-only and 1 amplitude+phase self-cals
performed on these data.  The task IMAGR can be used to produce Stokes
I, Q, U (and if you want - V) images.  The task COMB can then be used
to make images of the linearly polarized intensity and polarization
angle.  Try out PCNTR to make contour plots with polarization vectors
superposed.

Optional:

For those who thirst for more resolution, the multi-source
2 cm data are also available in FLUX99-2CM.U BAND with
calibration tables in FLUX99-2CM.CALTAB.  The split, calibrated
data can be found in MARS.TBU0, but you have to make your
own self-calibrated data if you want to see the final image.