Towards A New Figure of Merit for Reflector Antenna Based Imaging

A synthesis imaging pipeline for radio interferometric arrays is presented, developed to enable the direct mapping of antenna performance metrics to image quality. A brief overview of synthesis imaging for radio astronomy is given, providing background to the main functions in the developed pipeline. The features of the pipeline are discussed and an example of results presented, showing dirty images produced from complex visibilities. The pipeline is simplified to allow fast enough evaluation time for in-line optimization in reflector antenna design loops.