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I am an amateur astronomer and I took recent interest in Radio astronomy and I am also new to Digital Signal Processing. My team is trying to build a radio telescope. I am interested in the data analysis part. One thing that is predominant in the signals that is received is the noise.

This is the data from the Radio Telescope of The University of Illinois recorded on July 4th 2011 and the telescope was pointing towards the Cygnus constellation:

http://radio.uindy.edu/data/2011/07041059-2.txt

Note: I am interested only in the third column of data

I made a plot of the data using R and that turns out to be something like this:

enter image description here

This is the plot of the Cygnus constellation inferred by the University:

enter image description here

I manually matched the above image with my plot and took out a portion of my plot:

enter image description here

It seemed similar to me. The chances are that my manual matching is wrong. How do I tackle with the situation ?

I have just started learning DSP and please suggest resources and pointers for DSP techniques so that I may apply in radio astronomy.

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    $\begingroup$ What kind of result are you looking for? Do you want to produce a picture with your radiotelescope? Do you want to output the signal as a spectrogram, as a sound? Please give more details. $\endgroup$
    – PhilMacKay
    Commented Oct 22, 2012 at 21:44
  • $\begingroup$ While you might know about astronomy, and we might know about signal processing, we do not know about astronomy (at least I do not). What kind of data is present in the stream? You want to visualize it: is it a 1D or a 2D signal (or more?) If you just want to know what language do people program in, I guess the answer would be C++, MATLAB, python, but if this is not what you wanted, give us more info so we can help you. $\endgroup$
    – penelope
    Commented Oct 24, 2012 at 13:25
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    $\begingroup$ @penelope I am new to both DSP and Radio astronomy and I have completely changed the question now so that It can give enough clarity. The signal is 1 dimenstional $\endgroup$
    – addy
    Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 11:59
  • $\begingroup$ @addy Also, try adding more tags to your question. I browse most questions by tags, so it might make your question interesting to more users. If you're unsure what tags are appropriate, you have "recent tags" and "all tags" on the main page. I recommend 2-3 tags per question $\endgroup$
    – penelope
    Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 13:09
  • $\begingroup$ what tags do u suggest me to add ? $\endgroup$
    – addy
    Commented Oct 25, 2012 at 13:10

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The signal processing operation that measures how "alike" two signals are is called cross-correlation. For cross-correlation to work both signals must be sampled at the same rate. If they aren't, you must resample one of them to the rate of the other.

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