In this paper, we apply our sky map reconstruction method for transit type
interferometers to the Tianlai cylinder array. The method is based on the
spherical harmonic decomposition, and can be applied to cylindrical array as
well as dish arrays and we can compute the instrument response, synthesised
beam, transfer function and the noise power spectrum. We consider cylinder
arrays with feed spacing larger than half wavelength, and as expected, we find
that the arrays with regular spacing have grating lobes which produce spurious
images in the reconstructed maps. We show that this problem can be overcome,
using arrays with different feed spacing on each cylinder. We present the
reconstructed maps, and study the performance in terms of noise power spectrum,
transfer function and beams for both regular and irregular feed spacing
configurations.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figures, accepted by RA