This simulation allows you to understand "by hand" the relation between the geometry of an interferometric array (that is the location of the telescopes or apertures making up the array) and the corresponding uv-coverage.
The left-hand side plot shows the arangement of apertures. The user can select from several pre-set configurations (Y-shaped, hexagonal-grid, non-redundant) and modify them by moving, adding or removing individual apertures.
Moving one aperture by hand and observing what simultaneously happens on the right-hand side display is particularly "enlightening": for one, you develop a more intuitive of the relation between one aperture and the different interferometric baselines it is involved with. In addition, you can also observe that geometries laying on a regular grid pattern sometimes result in overlapping points in the uv-plane. The only pattern that strictly avoids this situation is the non-redundant geometry.
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Resulting uv-coverage |