It would appear that in the past week, something has happened to the Calibration .cat file I have been compiling for the equipment. Namely, it has dissappeared and in its stead is a string of garbled text. If anything, this serves to remind me that constant backing up and duplicating of documents is an essential part of any scientific undertaking. Interestingly, before the file went missing, a 25 point scan of the sun produced a (semi)-nice, (semi)-round representation of the Solar Disk. After attempting a 25 point scan post-calibration loss, I was greeted with no less than six suns, and a strongly emitting “V” of th 21cm wavelength spectrum.
A 25 point scan is a simple 5×5 grid of bins that are interpolated about the sun’s position in the sky. By using half beam-width bins to map across the sun in two dimensions, we can acheive a rudimentary contour graph of the intensity of the 1419.75 MHz emission line that eminates from our local star. This is purely useful as a calibration tool, as a correctly calibrated machine should produce a perfectly round disk of evenly spaced intensities. Unfortunately, I did not manage to capture an image of the mythical 6-star system that my first readings suggested we exist in, however below is a comparison of an uncalibrated system with a quasi-calibrated system that was aquired six hours into the reconstruction. As can be seen, the Pre-Calibration 25-Point scan shows two coherant sources plus noise, while the Post-Calibration 25-Point scan shows a single (and expected) coherant source with poor pointing.
25-Point Scan Pre- and Post-Calibration
After recompiling the srt.cat and tweaking parameters, I have managed to tighten the 25-point solar scan to a single coherant signal, however the pointing is still off-centre and the shape of this circle does not do justice to the greater circle community.
