Italian node of the European ALMA Regional Centre

The Italian node of the European ALMA Regional Centre is hosted by the Istituto di Radioastronomia in Bologna and is one of the seven nodes that constitute the European ARC Network that provides technical and scientific support to ALMA users. The network is coordinated by the central ESO ARC node that is one of the Atacama Large Millimiter Array (ALMA) partners.

The ARC nodes mission is to strengthen the European ALMA community to fully exploit the transformational nature of ALMA and to maximise the scientific return. At the same time, the network is committed to contributing in ALMA development of new or enhanced observing modes, as well as services and tools for both users and the observatory.

Therefore, the Italian ARC node staff supports the ALMA users in all the steps of their projects, by helping with

• ALMA proposal preparation and submission
• Optimisation of the observing strategy
• Tracking of project status
• ALMA data processing and imaging
• ALMA Science Archive mining