The Millennium Arecibo 21-cm Absorption Line Survey. I. Techniques and Gaussian Fits

We review the theory of measuring spectral lines in emission/absorption observations and apply it to a new survey of the 21-cm line against 79 continuum sources. We develop an observing technique and least-squares procedure to determine the opacity profile, the expected emission profile, and their uncertainty profiles. We discuss the radiative transfer for the two-component interstellar HI gas and use Gaussian components, separate ones for the Warm and Cold neutral media (WNM and CNM), as a practical implementation of a simple but physically correct model that successfully treats both simple and complicated profiles. Our Gaussians provide CNM spin temperatures, upper limits on kinetic temperatures for both CNM and WNM from the line widths, column densities, and velocities; we discuss these astrophysical aspects in Paper II.