In the experiments, collectively called UVX , the instruments were rigidly co-aligned to insure that the same part of the sky was observed by both. The Berkeley group had previously reported many extraordinarily bright patches of diffuse ultraviolet background, at high galactic latitudes. The purpose of the UVX experiment was to address this fundamental contradiction. A sample of spectral data from the Johns Hopkins UVX cosmic background experiment. The vertical discontinuity in the middle of the figure shows that most of the residual signal is due to instrumental dark current in the two spectrometers.
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The scan represents about 20 minutes of data taken while the spectrometers scanned a fairly blank region of the sky. Using Figure 4 we now discuss the various sources of noise that the observer of cosmic diffuse background must contend with. This is done in some detail to appreciate the difficulty of the observations and therefore to assess reliability when we examine the data, to determine which should be trusted. This page is maintained by Cren Frayer.