Summary
The Southern Hemisphere Imaging Riometer Experiment (SHIRE) is a phased array of radio receivers that observes the Antarctic sky at 38 MHz. It detects ionospheric absorption of cosmic radio noise near an altitude of 90km and is used to study the aurora and other high-latitude ionospheric phenomena. Successful use of such a riometer requires knowledge of natural diurnal variations in cosmic radio noise. The identification of discrete sources of radio noise that may be detected by such a riometer has important implications both for the study of the discrete sources and also calibration of the riometer beam pattern. Conventional riometers use a single broadbeam receiver and so a point source will not be visible above the background noise, thus this identification is only possible in a relatively narrow-beam imaging riometers such as SHIRE. The identification of such discrete cosmic radio sources is the aim of this project. This presentation will discuss the process of selecting radio sources, determining their crossing times, data selection and analysis, and some results of the investigation. While many apparent discrete and varying sources of cosmic radio noise seem to be present, detecting the signatures of radio stars is challenging.