Background: Downsampling is performed using Old Pipeline code called process_ncdf. All BGPS data was downsampled by a factor of 5 before mapping because of data size concerns. I did this 'blindly' (i.e., just accepted that I should) because James said I could. However, I had previously noted that the pointing files could not be done with downsampled data because the beams 'looked funny' or something along those lines; it may also have been a simple map sampling issue in which not all pixels were filled with a downsampled image. Anyway, I decided to go back and quantify the effects. The plots below are from the single "pointing-style" observation of OMC1 from 2009. The units are volts. 'ds1' indicates sampling at 0.02 seconds, 'ds5' indicates sampling every 0.1 seconds. The scan rate was 120"/s.

The beam sizes were measured from the autocorrelation maps. However, because there is structure on many scales in this map, I had to use a rather ad-hoc method to remove the correlated structure. I fitted a gaussian to the elliptical northwest-southeast structure, removed it, then fitted a gaussian to the remaining circular thing in the center, which is approximately the beam. If I fit the "beam" gaussian with an ellipse, I get: Beamsize 1_1: 36.15,26.23 Beamsize 1_5: 48.39,30.21 With a circle: Beamsize 1_1: 29.51 Beamsize 1_5: 35.31

The ds1 and ds5 images compared.

The PSDs of the two images (on identical grids). Note that ds5 loses power at small spatial scales, 50% at 40"!

The pixel-pixel plot with a fit that shows a 10% overall flux loss (best-fit).