'That can't be right.'

Hmmm.

So I've got this cool data, right? And that's fun and everything. But here's the thing. The image I have, taken this summer, is tilted 90 degrees from prior imaging in the same band. It's also twice the size. It's also bipolar in my two IF's (so at one frequency band, the left lobe appears, and in the other, the right lobe does). At first, without thinking very hard about it, I thought I understood that, but now I'm not sure. This is continuum emission, remember, not line emission. Even if it's Doppler-shifted to higher freq in one lobe and lower in the other, both lobes should at least show up. I shouldn't be able to detect such a thing, unless I'm coincidentally looking at a 5 GHz molecular line (the only one I know off-hand is formaldehyde (H2CO)... that's a pretty complex molecule for this environment) in a rotating disk or bipolar 'jets', and not getting any continuum at all. Not getting continuum? What's up with that?

So the first thing to do is go back and re-calibrate, and re-image the data using old-school tools (remember that I'm using and testing the new software package?). It is SO HARD to imagine anything that could be wrong in the new software that could produce these discrepancies, and that wasn't found before. I mean, seriously. A 90-degree rotation? Incorrect scaling? Somebody would have noticed these already. I'm sure of it. If Jupiter suddenly showed up twice as big as normal, someone would notice. I don't even know what to say about the IFs.

But it's also SO HARD to imagine an astrophysical scenario that could cause these kinds of changes in the 8-year period that we're talking about...

So that's what I'm doing today. Or, rather, re-doing today.