We present SimSpin, a new, public, software framework for generating integral field spectroscopy (IFS) data cubes from N-body/hydrodynamical simulations of galaxies, which can be compared directly with observational datasets. SimSpin provides a consistent method for studying a galaxy’s stellar component. It can be used to explore how observationally inferred measurements of kinematics, such as the spin parameter $\lambda_R$, are impacted by the effects of, for example, inclination, seeing conditions, distance. SimSpin is written in R and has been designed to be highly modular, flexible, and extensible. It is already being used by the astrophysics community to generate IFS-like cubes and FITS files for direct comparison of simulations to observations. In this paper, we explain the conceptual framework of SimSpin; how it is implemented in R; and we demonstrate SimSpin’s current capabilities, providing as an example a brief investigation of how numerical resolution affects how reliably we can recover the intrinsic stellar kinematics of a simulated galaxy.

We describe an ultra-wide-bandwidth, low-frequency receiver recently installed on the Parkes radio telescope. The receiver system provides continuous frequency coverage from 704 to 4032 MHz. For much of the band (${\sim}60\%$), the system temperature is approximately 22 K and the receiver system remains in a linear regime even in the presence of strong mobile phone transmissions. We discuss the scientific and technical aspects of the new receiver, including its astronomical objectives, as well as the feed, receiver, digitiser, and signal processor design. We describe the pipeline routines that form the archive-ready data products and how those data files can be accessed from the archives. The system performance is quantified, including the system noise and linearity, beam shape, antenna efficiency, polarisation calibration, and timing stability.

An imaging technique with sensitivity to short duration optical transients is described. The technique is based on the use of wide-field cameras operating in a drift scanning mode, whereby persistent objects produce trails on the sensor and short duration transients occupy localised groups of pixels. A benefit of the technique is that sensitivity to short duration signals is not accompanied by massive data rates, because the exposure time is much greater than the transient duration. The technique is demonstrated using a pre-prototype system composed of readily available and inexpensive commercial components, coupled with common coding environments, commercially available software, and free web-based services. The performance of the technique and the pre-prototype system is explored, including aspects of photometric and astrometric calibration, detection sensitivity, characterisation of candidate transients, and the differentiation of astronomical signals from non-astronomical signals (primarily glints from satellites in Earth orbit and cosmic ray hits on sensor pixels). Test observations were made using the pre-prototype system, achieving sensitivity to transients with 21-ms duration, resulting in the detection of five candidate transients. An investigation of these candidates concludes they are most likely due to cosmic ray hits on the sensor and/or satellites. The sensitivity obtained with the pre-prototype system is such that, under some models for the optical emission from fast radio bursts (FRBs), the detection of a typical FRB, such as FRB181228, to a distance of approximately 100 Mpc is plausible. Several options for improving the system/technique in the future are described.