Detecting the Magellanic Clouds

While receiving HI signals from within our own galaxy is interesting, of more interest to the author is the detection of extra-galactic HI signals. While this has been done for northern skies (see F1EHN's excellent description of reception of HI signals from M31 and M33), for HawkRAO here in the southern hemisphere a more suitable (and in HawkRAO's case - visible) target are the Magellanic Clouds (see details under the 'External Galaxies' tab).

First Try for the Large Magellanic Cloud

The first try for the Large Magellanic Cloud produced this result (the data acquisition run started a little late as the PC crashed due to insufficient hard disk space and so the LMC was moving out of the beam at the beginning of the run)...

This graphical display part of the analysis GUI was not completed at this stage, so results were written out to a .CSV file and simply plotted in Open Office Calc. The corresponding LAB survey result for the 'late' data RA run gives a rough confirmation...

Acquiring a longer time 'dark frame' allowed a reduction in noise in the result...

...which shows a nice similarity to the LAB survey result above and confirmation of the result.

LMC Results Obtained with Analysis GUI

Data analysis GUI software was completed and the data was processed via that application (no need for using OO Calc) from this point onwards.

The results of the first and second attempts at receiving HI signals from the LMC were obtained using a coarse setting of 64 FFT bins...

...which once again corresponds nicely to the LAB survey results...

The observation was repeated two days later (this one on time) and gave this result...

...which again looks like the LAB survey for centre of the LMC...

First Try for the Small Magellanic Cloud

The first attempt at detecting the Small Magellanic Cloud produced this result...

..which is similar to the LAB results (but notice how the 'dark frame' subtraction has reduced the foreground intra-galactic HI signal near 0 km/s by about 10 dB)...