line
parameter. The velocities are given in km/s, in the radio
or optical definition,
with respect to the rest frame of the dataset.
The main reason for `velocity channels' is that they are corrected for
the Earth's motion - a particular source
velocity component will remain in the same velocity channel regardless of
whether the observatory Doppler tracks or not.
The velocity specification is given in the form
line=velocity,nchan,start,width,stepor
line=felocity,nchan,start,width,stepwhere nchan is the number of velocity channels to select, start is the centre velocity of the first channel selected, width is the width of each channel, and step is the velocity step between channels. With the
velocity
form, the radio velocity definition is
assumed, whereas the felocity
form uses the optical definition.
Note, however, both forms produce channels at equal increments in
radio velocity (even the felocity
linetype). See
Section 5.4 for more information.
For example
line=velocity,10,1.5,1.0,3.0will specify 10 channels, having velocities (radio definition) centred at 1.5, 4.5, 7.5, etc, km/s, with respect to the rest frame. Each channel has a width of 1 km/s.
If the start, width and step values cause the velocity
channels not to map directly to the underlying correlator channels,
a weighted sum of correlator channels is used to determine a velocity
channel.
If the magnitude of the velocity channel width (the width value in
km/s) corresponds to correlator channel increment, i.e. if
For telescopes that do not Doppler track, such as the ATCA, it will rarely be the case that velocity channels map directly to correlator channels because of the continual change in the observatory's radial velocity.
There are some caveats when using velocity channels:
Miriad manager