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The Atacama Large Millimeter Array (ALMA)

Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is a revolutionary instrument located at 5000m high Chajnantor plateau in the Chilean Andes. It consists of 66 antennas, operated in interferometric mode, to explore the millimeter and submillimeter window with unprecedent sensitivity and angular resolution.

ALMA is an international collaboration of the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Natural Sciences of Japan in cooperation with the Republic of Chile. Given the complexity of ALMA and in order to increase accessibility of the observatory to much broader scientific community, the Joint ALMA Observatory (JAO) created a support infrastructure on the three continents. The European ALMA Regional Centre (ARC) was created in 2011, with the central node based at ESO Headquaters in Garching, Germany. The seven other European ARC nodes are spread over the continent, in Bonn-Cologne, Bologna, Grenoble, Leiden, Manchester, Ondrejov, Onsala, and an additional Center of Expertise in Lisbon.

The Czech ARC node Research Infrastructure

The Czech ARC node, hosted at the Astronomical Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, provides support to the ALMA user community of Central and Eastern European region. Since 2016, it is running as a Large Research Infrastructure EU-ARC.CZ. It collaborates with the Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT) in Prague, Charles University in Prague and Masaryk University in Brno. The Czech ARC node provides especially the following services:

• scientific and technical support in the field of solar and (extra) galactic research with ALMA. The solar support is unique within the entire European ARC network
• observation planning, data quality check
• data storage and processing, data reduction using CASA

Link to working version of the Czech ARC node proposal (pdf).
Link to presentation of the Czech ARC node (ppt).

Contact:

Address:

Fričova 298
251 65 Ondřejov
Czech Republic

Head:

Pavel Jáchym
e-mail: jachym @ ig.cas.cz
tel.: +420 226 258 444