Abstract

Received 2001 February 2, accepted 2001 April 11

We have commenced a program to monitor the gravitational lens B1152+199 with the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA) to search for variability of the lensed components with the goal of measuring the lensing time delay. As part of this program we made a 9 hour full-synthesis observation in June 2000 to derive a ‘template’ for model-fitting the shorter, multi-epoch, monitoring observations. We report here on the results of this full-synthesis observation and on three additional epochs of monitoring for time variation.