Title: Estimating solar flux density at low radio frequencies using a sky brightness model,
Abstract: Sky models have been used in the past to calibrate individual low radio
frequency telescopes. Here we generalize this approach from a single antenna to
a two element interferometer and formulate the problem in a manner to allow us
to estimate the flux density of the Sun using the normalized cross-correlations
(visibilities) measured on a low resolution interferometric baseline. For wide
field-of-view instruments, typically the case at low radio frequencies, this
approach can provide robust absolute solar flux calibration for well
characterized antennas and receiver systems. It can provide a reliable and
computationally lean method for extracting parameters of physical interest
using a small fraction of the voluminous interferometric data, which can be
prohibitingly compute intensive to calibrate and image using conventional
approaches. We demonstrate this technique by applying it to data from the
Murchison Widefield Array and assess its reliability.