Commissioning Observations

The following observations were taken on Feb 6 by actively scanning the antenna over a 10 sq.degree field near 10h40m, -48d with the multibeam feed rotated approximately 15 degrees to the scan direction, which was alternately in RA and DEC (Observers: Barnes, Kesteven, Staveley-Smith, Wilson).
  1. UKS1038-483: The barred LSB galaxy at 1052 km/s is in the centre of this field which was observed for about 2 hr. 28,700 spectra were gridded to produce the image at the bottom. Declination scanning artefacts can be seen. The profile above is a spectrum of the galaxy (flux density against velocity).

  2. Interference: several bursts of satellite interference at one particular frequency (1380 MHz) can be seen here. You can see the position of the array where these occur. The data here has been partially robustly processed, so that the interfence is not smeared out through the sliding window used for bandpass removal.

  3. Interference: As above, but with full robust processing. The effect of the GPS interference is further suppressed.

The data reduction and telescope interface uses AIPS++, a new package of astronomical data reduction routines and C++ libraries. Multibeam-specific aspects of the software used to produce the above images were written by David Barnes, Richard Gooch, Mike Kesteven, Tom Oosterloo, Lister Staveley-Smith and Taisheng Ye, with help from a great many in the aips++ team.
Lister Staveley-Smith
Last modified: Fri Apr 17 16:00:10 EST 1998