Vehicle for civil helicopter ride quality research

A research aircraft for investigating the factors involved in civil helicopter operations was developed for NASA Langley Research Center. The aircraft is a reconfigured 17000 kg (36000 lb) military transport helicopter. The basic aircraft was reconfigured with advanced acoustic treatment, air-conditioning, and a 16-seat airline cabin. During the spring of 1975, the aircraft was flight tested to measure interior environment characteristics - noise and vibration - and was flown on 60 subjective flight missions with over 600 different subjects. Data flights established noise levels somewhat higher than expected, with a pure tone at 1400 Hz and vertical vibration levels between 0.07g and 0.17g. The noise and vibration levels were documented during subjective flight evaluations as being the primary source of discomfort. The aircraft will be utilized to document in detail the impact of various noise and vibration levels on passenger comfort during typical short-haul missions

Representations of celestial coordinates in FITS

In Paper I, Greisen & Calabretta (2002) describe a generalized method for assigning physical coordinates to FITS image pixels. This paper implements this method for all spherical map projections likely to be of interest in astronomy. The new methods encompass existing informal FITS spherical coordinate conventions and translations from them are described. Detailed examples of header interpretation and construction are given.Comment: Consequent to Paper I: "Representations of world coordinates in FITS". 45 pages, 38 figures, 13 tables, aa macros v5.2 (2002/Jun). Both papers submitted to Astronomy & Astrophysics (2002/07/19). Replaced to try to get figure and table placement right (no textual changes

Physical Properties of the X-ray Luminous SN 1978K in NGC 1313 from Multiwavelength Observations

We update the light curves from the X-ray, optical, and radio bandpasses which we have assembled over the past decade, and present two observations in the ultraviolet using the Hubble Space Telescope Faint Object Spectrograph. The HRI X-ray light curve is constant within the errors over the entire observation period. This behavior is confirmed in the ASCA GIS data obtained in 1993 and 1995. In the ultraviolet, we detected Ly-alpha, the [Ne IV] 2422/2424 A doublet, the Mg II doublet at 2800 A, and a line at ~3190 A we attribute to He I 3187. Only the Mg II and He I lines are detected at SN1978K's position. The optical light curve is formally constant within the errors, although a slight upward trend may be present. The radio light curve continues its steep decline. The longer time span of our radio observations compared to previous studies shows that SN1978K is in the same class of highly X-ray and radio-luminous supernovae as SN1986J and SN1988Z. The [Ne IV] emission is spatially distant from the location of SN1978K and originates in the pre-shocked matter. The Mg II doublet flux ratio implies the quantity of line optical depth times density of ~10^14 cm^-3 for its emission region. The emission site must lie in the shocked gas.Comment: 32 pages, 13 figs; LaTeX with AASTEXv5; paper accepted, scheduled for AJ, Dec 199

Early-type galaxies in the SDSS. II. Correlations between observables

A magnitude limited sample of nearly 9000 early-type galaxies, in the redshift range 0.01 < z < 0.3, was selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey using morphological and spectral criteria. The sample was used to study how early-type galaxy observables, including luminosity L, effective radius R_o, surface brightness I_o, color, and velocity dispersion sigma, are correlated with one another. Measurement biases are understood with mock catalogs which reproduce all of the observed scaling relations and their dependences on fitting technique. At any given redshift, the intrinsic distribution of luminosities, sizes and velocity dispersions in our sample are all approximately Gaussian. A maximum likelihood analysis shows that sigma ~ L^{0.25\pm 0.012}, R_o ~ L^{0.63\pm 0.025}, and R_o ~ I^{-0.75\pm 0.02} in the r* band. In addition, the mass-to-light ratio within the effective radius scales as M_o/L ~ L^{0.14\pm 0.02} or M_o/L ~ M_o^{0.22\pm 0.05}, and galaxies with larger effective masses have smaller effective densities: Delta_o ~ M_o^{-0.52\pm 0.03}. These relations are approximately the same in the g*, i* and z* bands. Relative to the population at the median redshift in the sample, galaxies at lower and higher redshifts have evolved only little, with more evolution in the bluer bands. The luminosity function is consistent with weak passive luminosity evolution and a formation time of about 9 Gyrs ago.Comment: 29 pages, 11 figures. Accepted by AJ (scheduled for April 2003). This paper is part II of a revised version of astro-ph/011034

Exploring the inner region of Type 1 AGNs with the Keck interferometer

The exploration of extragalactic objects with long-baseline interferometers in the near-infrared has been very limited. Here we report successful observations with the Keck interferometer at K-band (2.2 um) for four Type 1 AGNs, namely NGC4151, Mrk231, NGC4051, and the QSO IRAS13349+2438 at z=0.108. For the latter three objects, these are the first long-baseline interferometric measurements in the infrared. We detect high visibilities (V^2 ~ 0.8-0.9) for all the four objects, including NGC4151 for which we confirm the high V^2 level measured by Swain et al.(2003). We marginally detect a decrease of V^2 with increasing baseline lengths for NGC4151, although over a very limited range, where the decrease and absolute V^2 are well fitted with a ring model of radius 0.45+/-0.04 mas (0.039+/-0.003 pc). Strikingly, this matches independent radius measurements from optical--infrared reverberations that are thought to be probing the dust sublimation radius. We also show that the effective radius of the other objects, obtained from the same ring model, is either roughly equal to or slightly larger than the reverberation radius as a function of AGN luminosity. This suggests that we are indeed partially resolving the dust sublimation region. The ratio of the effective ring radius to the reverberation radius might also give us an approximate probe for the radial structure of the inner accreting material in each object. This should be scrutinized with further observations.Comment: accepted for publication in A&A Letter

Digital Deblurring of CMB Maps II: Asymmetric Point Spread Function

In this second paper in a series dedicated to developing efficient numerical techniques for the deblurring Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps, we consider the case of asymmetric point spread functions (PSF). Although conceptually this problem is not different from the symmetric case, there are important differences from the computational point of view because it is no longer possible to use some of the efficient numerical techniques that work with symmetric PSFs. We present procedures that permit the use of efficient techniques even when this condition is not met. In particular, two methods are considered: a procedure based on a Kronecker approximation technique that can be implemented with the numerical methods used with symmetric PSFs but that has the limitation of requiring only mildly asymmetric PSFs. The second is a variant of the classic Tikhonov technique that works even with very asymmetric PSFs but that requires discarding the edges of the maps. We provide details for efficient implementations of the algorithms. Their performance is tested on simulated CMB maps.Comment: 9 pages, 13 Figure

A Deep ROSAT HRI Observation of NGC 1313

We describe a series of observations of NGC 1313 using the ROSAT HRI with a combined exposure time of 183.5 ksec. The observations span an interval between 1992 and 1998; the purpose of observations since 1994 was to monitor the X-ray flux of SN1978K, one of several luminous sources in the galaxy. No diffuse emission is detected in the galaxy to a level of ~1-2x10^37 ergs/s/arcmin^-2. A total of eight sources are detected in the summed image within the D_25 diameter of the galaxy. The luminosities of five of the eight range from \~6x10^37 to ~6x10^38 erg/s; these sources are most likely accreting X-ray binaries, similar to sources obseved in M31 and M33. The remaining three sources all emit above 10^39 erg/s. We present light curves of the five brightest sources. Variability is detected at the 99.9% level from four of these. We identify one of the sources as an NGC 1313 counterpart of a Galactic X-ray source. The light curve, though crudely sampled, most closely resembles that of a Galactic black hole candidate such as GX339-4, but with considerably higher peak X-ray luminosity. An additional seven sources lie outside of the D_25 diameter and are either foreground stars or background AGN.Comment: 18 pages, 9 figures; accepted AJ, scheduled for November 200