2007 October 16
Spent some time fighting with my broadband spectra data today. Only really looked at Cas A at 1440 MHz in XX and YY pols; XX yields poor a image, while YY yields junk. I spent some time trying to figure out why that was, with no luck. The dataset isn’t obviously crap or anything, and while it has fewer data points, I think it should still have enough to get something resembling a point source out of the inversoin. I’ll try a few nearby frequencies to see if YY is consistently problematic. If it’s just a one-off thing I’ll worry about it later. (Frequencies near 1420 MHz are good because there’s an FCC ban on radio emissions in that frequency region. This is actually a favor to radio astronomers; the very important molecular hydrogen hyperfine transition line is at 1420 MHz.)
Then a lot of lab. People were mostly doing their thing so I spent the time making a pretty picture. The result is to the left, hopefully. (Image handling in WordPress seems kinda wonky. Looks like the image actually shows up on the right. Also, there doesn’t seem to be any automatic thumbnailing, so I had to shrink the image a bit. Right-click on the image and choose “View Image” or something analogous to see the full-size version.) Could be better, but not bad for a night’s work.