Speaker
Description
SKA precursors are giving us a first glimpse of the future capabilities of SKA. Designed to be the most sensitive radio telescopes ever, the precursors are planned to release large area surveys with arcsec resolution. However, the final image product is heavily influenced by the data reduction. Not only the huge data quantity makes a careful visual inspection and manual reduction of the data impractical, but using new data reduction techniques is mandatory to correct imaging errors that prevent reaching the theoretical sensitivity. The cost is the extreme computational demand. New data reduction pipelines have been developed to overcome this problem, running on HPC facilities. In this talk we present the science case of the data reduction of the SARAO MeerKAT Galactic plane survey as a particular case of Galactic data reduction. We will focus on all the peculiarities of Galactic data processing and on the challenges they pose. We will finally show some solutions we are adopting and what we expect in future surveys.
