The uv coverage of an ensemble of antennas. It consists of elliptical loci traced out in the uv plane as the earth rotates.
where is the hour angle Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy and is the declination Eric Weisstein's World of Astronomy of the phase reference position, and L is the coordinate difference between two antennas. Eliminating H from the expression for u and v gives
The brightness in the uv plane is Hermitian Eric Weisstein's World of Math since it only takes on real values. The best uv coverage is obtained when the source is 90° away from the antennas. This maximizes earth rotation synthesis.