Determination of Galaxy Spin Vectors in the Pisces-Perseus Supercluster with the Arecibo Telescope

We use HI observations made with the upgraded Arecibo 305M Telescope inAugust 1998 to obtain accurate spin vector determinations for 54 nearly edge-ongalaxies in the Minnesota Automated Plate Scanner Pisces-Perseus Survey(MAPS-PP). We introduce a simple observational technique of determining thesense of rotation for galaxies, even when their HI disks are not fullyresolved. We examined the spin vector distribution of these 54 galaxies forevidence of preferential galaxy alignments. We use the Kuiper statistic, avariant of the Kolmogorov--Smirnov statistic, to determine the significance ofany anisotropies in the distribution of galaxy spin vectors. The possibility of``spin vector domains'' is also investigated. We find no significant evidenceof preferential galaxy alignments in this sample. However, we show tha t thesmall sample size places weak limits on the level of galaxy alignments.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, Accepted for Publication in Astronomical Journa