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PILOT

PILOT (Polarized Instrument for Long Wavelength Observation of the Tenuous ISM) is balloon-borne experiment to obtain wide-field maps of the polarised thermal dust emission at 240 microns in the Milky Way and Local Group galaxies. There have been two scientific PILOT flights, from Timmins, Canada in 2015 and from Alice Springs, Australia in 2017. A third scientific PILOT flight from Timmins is scheduled for September 2019.

CADE currently only distributes PILOT Stokes I maps, and normalised PILOT Stokes Q and U maps of a 4 x 7 degree region ( -2 < l < 2, -4<b<3) covering the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) of the Milky Way. Other regions observed by PILOT will be added in the future. The PILOT CMZ data were obtained during the Alice Springs 2017 flight, and have an angular resolution of 2.2 arcminutes. The scientific analysis of these data is presented in Mangilli et al (2019, see references below).

The units of the Stokes I data are “MJy/sr”. The Stokes Q and U data have been scaled to yield an artificial polarization fraction of 100%. With this normalisation, the PILOT Stokes Q and U maps are suitable for deriving the dust polarization angle, but not the dust polarization fraction.

References

Maps

- Intensity: PILOT_240_I_1_4096_partial.fits

- Stokes U: PILOT_240_U_1_4096_partial.fits

- Stokes Q: PILOT_240_Q_1_4096_partial.fits

PILOT Intensity PILOT POLU PILOT POLQ

HiPS

(unzip the directory and put it directly in an Aladin window to display the map)

- Intensity : PILOT_240_I.zip

- Stokes U : PILOT_240_U.zip

- Stokes Q : PILOT_240_Q.zip

Original WCS Data

Intensity: Here Stokes U: Here Stokes Q: Here

Project Website