Thursday, January 20, 2005


Image from Dominion Radio Astrophysical Observatory
near Penticton, BC, Canada
Posted by at

5 comments:

Robert said...

Did you ever get that nagging feeling that you're being watched?

11:15 AM
KMJ said...

hehe...

That is seriously the eeriest image. Blechh!

6:09 PM
Milan said...

Hum... When I think how difficult it is to take decent pictures at night with our cameras... I wonder how many hours, or days, their sensors took to capture these things!

10:14 AM
bingo and betty said...

Hi Milan, The Canadian Galactic Plane Survey (CGPS) is a project aimed at improving our understanding of the constituents and processes of the interstellar medium (ISM) in our Galaxy. To this end, wide-field images of unprecedented detail are being assembled at many wavelengths by a consortium of astronomers from Canadian and international institutions. These will allow us to study dust grains, molecular gas, atomic gas, ionized gas, and relativistic plasmas, with spatial resolutions that are up to a factor of 10 better than in previous surveys, made possible by advances in technlogy and computing in recent years.

DRAO is contributing data on the distribution and kinematics of atomic gas, as well as the distribution of ionized gas and relativistic plasmas. These observations are the centerpiece of the CGPS, and will cover Galactic longitudes from l=74.2 to 147.3 degrees and latitudes from b=-3.5 to +5.5 degrees, resolving features as small as 1 arcminute. The DRAO data products consist of a ``data-cube'' of the spatial distribution of atomic hydrogen over 256 velocity channels, with a spatial resolution of 1 arcminute and a velocity resolution of 1.2 km/s, together with 1420MHz continuum images of Stokes I, Q, U and V (i.e. full polarimetry) having 1 arcminute resolution, and 408 MHz continuum images of Stokes I at 3.5 arcminute resolution.

About 85% of the time available for observing at DRAO is being devoted to this project (the remainder is assigned to external proposals selected through a peer review process; proposal forms are available electronically). A total of 190 CGPS fields are being observed with the Synthesis Telescope during the 5 year observing phase, which ends in March 2000, with the data being reduced on-site from raw form to final images by a team of 6 people. Some data processing is also being carried out at the University of Calgary, notably the registration of source positions and flux densities relative to established scales, and reduction of the 1420MHz Stokes Q, U, and V data.

10:30 AM
bingo and betty said...

http://www.drao.nrc.ca/index_eng.shtml

10:31 AM

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