The Outsider's Inside View post#020 - Right of Center

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Profile KevinDouglasPhD
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Message 581418 - Posted: 4 Jun 2007, 21:47:30 UTC

Things are going well, if a bit slowly. On Friday vader had some problems so 4 of my SETHI jobs got killed. I restarted two of them on lando and one on thumper, and the last one was restarted on vader this morning. That one might be the last of the 144 datacubes that gets made. I have 131 done, so only 13 left to go.

With the GALFA data, I've been inspecting my cubes for quality purposes, and discoverd the joy of finding galaxies at high velocities. Here's an example; this is NGC 3274 in optical:

and here is an image of it with GALFA data, after co-adding about 250 velocity channels together:

I'm afraid I don't have the angular scale of the optical image at the moment. Anyway, let's use the 3-D nature of the datacubes to look at NGC 3274 along the other axis projections. Here's RA by velocity:

and velocity by declination:

And finally, the spectrum of the galaxy, at a pixel somewhere near its center:

So, this galaxy, like most others, is right of center, ie. at a positive velocity, so it's moving away from us (redshifted). Neat, eh?

I've found about 40 galaxies so far, and I've got several more cubes to look at. I think with an automated search we'll find some that the eye can't pick up too.

I've been enjoying the NHL final. Glad Pronger got suspended for his high hit. I will be going up to Canada this Thursday/Friday, so it's too bad no games are scheduled those days. It's for a job interview, so I'm also busy preparing for that.
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Profile Jim_S
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Message 581427 - Posted: 4 Jun 2007, 22:04:40 UTC
Last modified: 4 Jun 2007, 22:06:03 UTC

Kevin, You do really "Cool" work sir!
Very interesting updates and informative narration.

I Desire Peace and Justice, Jim Scott (Mod-Ret.)
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Wander Saito
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Message 581523 - Posted: 5 Jun 2007, 0:47:47 UTC

I think the SECOND best feature of these posts must be way you manage to explain what you're doing, or what this or that is in plain English. The first? These cool pics you publish in every post! Thanks Kevin.

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Wander
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Message 581921 - Posted: 5 Jun 2007, 23:31:29 UTC

Eye candy never hurts! Seriously though, these analyses/graphs look pretty neat.

What would interest me is what these may be used for in the future (the datacubes/the fully-assembled data you calculated in them) - sadly, I'm not an astronomer and have no real idea what HI-spectra are useful for.

Some people mentioned that the data harvested by your datacubes would be useful for other applications, but not which.

I'm just nosy, I know..."intrigued" would sound better ;o)

Regards,
Simon.
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Profile ML1
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Message 581992 - Posted: 6 Jun 2007, 0:59:32 UTC - in response to Message 581921.  

What would interest me is what these may be used for in the future (the datacubes/the fully-assembled data you calculated in them) - sadly, I'm not an astronomer and have no real idea what HI-spectra are useful for.

Construct the 3-D shape of our galaxy and nearby galaxies?

Check the velocities to see how our galaxy will change shape and evolve?

Check that physics appears to be working as we understand it?!

Or?...

It all certainly looks good!

Happy crunchin',
Martin

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Message 582085 - Posted: 6 Jun 2007, 3:09:22 UTC - in response to Message 581418.  

I'm afraid I don't have the angular scale of the optical image at the moment.

It looks exactly like the red-light POSSI image that Aladin brings up for NGC 3274: 14.1 arc-minutes square, at about 1.7"/pixel. The galaxy itself is listed as subtending just over 1.8'.

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Message boards : SETI@home Staff Blog : The Outsider's Inside View post#020 - Right of Center


 
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