R. Craig Walker

NRAO Scientist Emeritus

I am a retired staff scientist with the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, with an emeritus position at the Array Operations Center in Socorro New Mexico, USA. My research interests are mainly in the area of high resolution observations of extragalactic radio sources. Most of my time was spent in observatory and user support, especially related to the Very Long Baseline Array.

My main science project lately has been a large project to observe the dynamics of the jet launch region near the black hole in M87. The resulting paper has now been published. References and links to the Astrophysical Journal publication and to the arXiv preprint can be found at this ADS link. Note that there are movies in the publication so it is better to get it on-line. Much of the information in the paper is included in the M87 link below, although that page was written for some meetings in 2016 when the writing of the paper was just starting.

See the 2009 press release about our M87 joint TeV/VLBA results.

LINKS TO MY WEB PAGES:

PUBLICATIONS: This page contains links, with the aid of ADS, to most of my publications.

PRESENTATION SLIDES: In this area, I have HTML versions of the slides used in some talks. (Badly needs update.)

M87 Project: Prelimary results, including a movie, from a project to study the dynamics of the base of the M87 jet using the VLBA at 43 GHz.

ASTRONOMICAL IMAGES: Some astronomical images I have made (Not much yet).

SOCORRO: Follow this link to see some photos of Socorro and surrounding region.

PIE TOWN HOLOGRAPHY: This link leads to some photos of the equipment being used to do holography on the Pie Town VLBA antenna. This is rather old.

VLBA FIBER CONNECTIONS: This gives some of what we know relating to a possible future project to connect the VLBA with fiber for real time correlation. This is getting somewhat out of date - it was last updated in March 2005.

TELESCOPE PICTURES: This is a collection of photos I have taken of telescopes and other astronomy related subjects. (not much yet)

MARKII Correlator:The old NRAO Mark II VLBI correlator is at risk of being thrown out. These photos show its condition in March 2004. There is also a photo related to the EVLA first fringes.

UV SCENARIOS: This section gives the UV coverage for some hypothetical VLBI arrays, mostly consisting of the VLBA plus some station station someone has asked about.

PHOTOGRAPHS from trips etc. Includes photos of Hein Hvatum.

-- NEW -- Photos of the Moon over Mt. Olympus, WA, during the Appolo 11 landing and moonwalk.

My personal home page outside NRAO.

LINKS: Some useful web links.

Local pages. Access limited to NRAO network sites.

SCHED: I was the primary author and supporter of the program used for scheduling VLBI observations on the VLBA, the European VLBI Network (EVN), and for other astronomical VLBI observations.  The html version of the SCHED Manual is at this link. The manual for the beta version available inside NRAO is here. Since my retirement, the support situation for this program has not been clear.

Here are a couple of sample SCHED plots useful for proposal and observation planning. They are here to help tempt observers to use the plotting capabilities of SCHED.

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Copyright © 2009 Associated Universities, Inc.
The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.

Modified on Sunday, 14-Jul-2019 23:11:15 MDT by cwalker.