Optimization of Moment Masking for CO Spectral Line Surveys

Understand

We describe and refine the masked moment method used to suppress noise in Galactic and extragalactic spectral line surveys.

• By applying the refined technique to an essentially noise-free CO molecular cloud survey with Gaussian noise added, we determine the optimum masking parameters for typical CO surveys such as those presented in Dame et al.
• (2001, ApJ, 547, 792)