The signature
One sweep. Every range at once.
A faint return doesn't arrive as a number — it arrives as a position. Vela plots each contact on concentric range-rings the moment the sweep crosses it, so distance, bearing and strength are read by where the mark sits, not by hunting a label. The brightest bloom is the one you're tracking; a coral mark is the one you haven't resolved yet.
Spectral stack
The same return, read across every band.
Below the scope, one contact is split into frameless strata — each a frequency window with its own waveform and reading. The kink shows before the alarm does.
Hydrogen line · 1.42 GHz
The quiet reference band. A steady return here means the array is hearing clean — the baseline against which everything else is weighed.
Pulsar window · 327 MHz
Periodic spikes mark a rotating source. When the period drifts, the window flags amber and the dwell time auto-extends to recover the phase.
Narrowband · 8.4 GHz
A clean tone where nature is broad. This is the band that matters — flagged coral, held for review, never auto-dismissed.
Drake-9 listening post
Built for the long watch.
Thirty-two dishes, one console. Vela keeps the whole night legible — integration time, sky temperature, channel health and held candidates — so an operator can read the array at a glance and know where to point next.