ICRAR-IVEC Summer Project ‚ 2013-14 Searching for New Galaxies in the Nearby Universe Asif RRasha Supervisor: Dr Tobias Westmeier International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009, Australia Abstract The objective of the summer project was to process and analyze the deep sky survey data collected using the 64m Parkes Radio Telescope at the 21cm emission line of neutral hydrogen to search for galaxies. The report discusses the data processing done using Parkes data reduction software and source finding using existing software called Duchamp. It also discusses the process of analyzing the output data from Duchamp to produce a parameterized catalogue of galaxies. I. Introduction Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe and is a major constituent of galaxies. Neutral hydrogen, which consists of a proton and an electron, emits/absorbs a photon at 21cm wavelength (1420.405751 MHz) when there is a relative spin flip between the proton and the electron [2]. Since the Universe is expanding, most of the galaxies are receding away from us. As the galaxies recede, due to the Doppler effect, there is a shift in observed frequency. By sur- veying the sky with a radio telescope at „1420 MHz with a wider bandwidth, the receding galaxies can be detected at frequencies lower than the HI rest frequency. II. Background An HI survey was done between May and September 2013 using the Parkes Radio Tele- scope across the Sculptor region. The sur- vey frequency ranged from 1100 MHz to 1500MHz, covering the Sculptor region out to a redshift of up to 0.2. The Parkes Radio Telescope has a few backend correlators, with the MBCORR and HIPSR cor- relators used for this survey. MBCORR is a fairly old correlator with the HIPSR having being installed recently. Both correlators were simultaneously used for the survey, however, our project only looked at the HIPSR data. The MBCORR data was used for retriving T-sys information from the header. Table 1: Parameters for the HIPSR Sculptor group sur- vey Sky Coverage(RA) 00 < RA < 01 h Sky Coverage(dec) -30 < δ<-18 Integration time per beam 1h15min Frequency resolution 10km/s FWHM of beam 14.68 arcmin RMS 4.8 mJy Since the HIPSR correlator is new and largely untested, the final results could be used to provide indirectly some feedback on the efficiency and reliability of the correla- tor. Also the survey covers a much wider fre- quency range with a longer integration time (i.e. lower RMS) than the original HIPASS sur- vey, increasing the possibility of finding new galaxies that were not previously detected in the HIPASS survey. III. Methodology I. Data Reduction A script written by Danny Price was used to convert the HIPSR files (from HDF5 to sdfits format) while extracting the calibration in- formation from the corresponding MBCORR 1