Illkirch Survey of Galactic Hydrogen: : Data Cube


Joachim Köppen Strasbourg Oct.2012/Jan.2018


Some brief explanations

This tool shows the results of a data cube survey at the radio line of atomic hydrogen at 21 cm wavelength, done with the ESA-Haystack radio telescope at the International Space University in Illkirch between February and October 2012.

The initial objective of this survey was to observe the Galactic Plane near longitude 90° in greater detail, to show how the outer spiral arms are located above the Plane, and how their position changes with longitude. Albeit the step of 1° taken in latitude is much less than the width of the antenna beam (about 6°), these oversampled data provide a better view of the spiral arms. From these data, it is possible to construct a view of the spiral arms in three dimensions.

Eventually, this survey was extended to the entire Milky Way Plane visible to us. Data were taken by staying 5 min at each galactic longitude (from 0° to 250° in steps of 2°) and galactic latitude from -10° to +10° (in steps of 1°), with a coverage in radial velocity from -150 to +150 km/s.

The system temperature was about 300 K or below..

The results are shown as:




dataset: glong range:


show: vrad = glong = glat =


Mouse position:



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