Signal Processing in Amateur Radio Astronomy I am an amateur astronomer and I took recent interest in Radio astronomy and I am also new to Digital Signal Processing. My team is trying to build a radio telescope. I am interested in the data analysis part. One thing that is predominant in the signals that is received is the noise.

This is the data from the Radio Telescope of The University of Illinois recorded on July 4th 2011 and the telescope was pointing towards the Cygnus constellation:

http://radio.uindy.edu/data/2011/07041059-2.txt

Note: I am interested only in the third column of data

I made a plot of the data using R and that turns out to be something like this:



This is the plot of the Cygnus constellation inferred by the University:



I manually matched the above image with my plot and took out a portion of my plot:



It seemed similar to me. The chances are that my manual matching is wrong. How do I tackle with the situation ?

I have just started learning DSP and please suggest resources and pointers for DSP techniques so that I may apply in radio astronomy.
The signal processing operation that measures how "alike" two signals are is called cross-correlation.  For cross-correlation to work both signals must be sampled at the same rate.  If they aren't, you must resample one of them to the rate of the other.