AARTFAAC flux density calibration

AARTFAAC produces a stream of all-sky images at a rate of 1s in order to survey the Northern hemisphere for short duration, low-frequency transients, such as the prompt electromagnetic counterpart to gravitational wave events, magnetar flares, blazars, and other as of yet unobserved phenomena.

Therefore, an independent flux density scaling solution per image is calculated via bootstrapping, comparing the measured apparent brightness of sources in the field to a reference catalogue. However, the lack of accurate flux density measurements of bright sources below 74MHz necessitated the creation of the AARTFAAC source catalogue, at 60MHz, which contains 167 sources across the Northern hemisphere. Using this as a reference results in a sufficiently high number of detected sources in each image to calculate a stable and accurate flux scale per 1s snapshot, in real-time.