The task moment can be used to generate moment images from a spectral-line cube. The moment axis should be either the first or third in the cube (e.g. vxy or xyv order). You should use reorder
if you want the moment of the second axis for some reason. The moments (evaluated for each spatial pixel and along the velocity axis) are defined as
where I(v) is the intensity at a given velocity v . Thus, the zeroth moment corresponds to the integrated intensity over velocity, the first moment corresponds to the intensity weighted velocity, and the second moment corresponds to the intensity weighted velocity dispersion squared.
Note that moment is actually a little inconsistent in applying this equation depending on which moment it is working out. Here is what it finds:
in units of Jy km/s .
in km/s .
in km/s .
In the example we compute the second moment of a cube in xyv
order excluding all pixels below 3-
which happens
to be 2 mJy it seems; there is no point to adding noise
to our sums. We select only the inner quarter of
each spatial plane and we select only planes 40 to 480 for
this analysis.
