Astrophysics

    

Evaluating the Alignment of Astronomical Linear Polarization Data, Introductory Software

Authors: Richard Shurtleff

This article is a Mathematica notebook that is meant to serve as a template. User-supplied astronomical observations of transverse vectors on the sky can be evaluated, their alignment judged by the so-called Hub test. The test can be applied to any set of transverse vectors on a spherical surface, but the language here applies to linear polarization directions of electromagnetic radiation from astronomical sources. This article presents a simulation, analyzing artificial data as an illustration of the process. The analysis produces a numerical value quantifying the alignment and its significance. A visual representation of the alignment is developed, mapping regions of convergence and divergence on the Celestial sphere.

Comments: 18 pages, 2 figures

Download: PDF

Submission history

[v1] 2021-01-11 06:34:47
[v2] 2021-01-24 19:27:34
[v3] 2021-02-23 13:46:44

Unique-IP document downloads: 332 times

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