Sagittarius A lunar occultation measured by Dwingeloo Radio Telescope 2023-12-13

This dataset contains raw spectra from the Lunar occultation of Sagittarius A on December 13, 2023. The data were obtained with the Dwingeloo Radio Telescope, which is operated by Stichting CAMRAS.

Three bands are measured:

• 1418MHz, 6MHz wide. The spectra show absorption and emission of the hydrogen line.
  
  • Spectra with 2000 bins, integration time 0.2 seconds (corrected for bandpass).
  • Total power with integration time 1 second.
• 1330MHz, 10MHz wide.
  • Spectra with 5000 bins, integration time 1 second.
  • Total power with integration time 1 second.
• 415MHz, 4MHz wide. This data is severely affected by radio frequency interference.
  
  • Spectra with 2000 bins, integration time 1 second.
  • Total power with integration time 1 second.

The telescope was tracking Sagittarius A* during the occultation. The altitude ranged from 1 to 8 degrees above the horizon during the measurements. This is very low, leading to quite severe radio frequency interference. Partially, these are caused by LTE masts transmitting at 1456 MHz, for which the receiving system is insufficiently shielded. All frequencies are topocentric, i.e. no LSR-correction has been applied.

Files are in the ECSV format, which can be read with Astropy, or with any other program that can read CSV-data (such as Microsoft Excel). Apart from the spectra, also telescope pointing information and exact times are stored in every row.