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Abstract Using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder to measure 21 cm absorption spectra toward continuum background sources, we study the cool phase of the neutral atomic gas in the far outer disk, and in the inner Galaxy near the end of the Galactic bar at longitude 340°. In the inner Galaxy, the cool atomic gas has a smaller scale height than in the solar neighborhood, similar to the molecular gas and the super-thin stellar population in the bar. In the outer Galaxy, the cool atomic gas is mixed with the warm, neutral medium, with the cool fraction staying roughly constant with the Galactic radius. The ratio of the emission brightness temperature to the absorption, i.e., 1 − e − τ , is roughly constant for velocities corresponding to Galactic radius greater than about twice the solar circle radius. The ratio has a value of about 300 K, but this does not correspond to a physical temperature in the gas. If the gas causing the absorption has kinetic temperature of about 100 K, as in the solar neighborhood, then the value 300 K indicates that the fraction of the gas mass in this phase is one-third of the total H i mass. 

Abstract We present the most sensitive and detailed view of the neutral hydrogen ( $${\rm H\small I}$$ ) emission associated with the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), through the combination of data from the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and Parkes (Murriyang), as part of the Galactic Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (GASKAP) pilot survey. These GASKAP-HI pilot observations, for the first time, reveal $${\rm H\small I}$$ in the SMC on similar physical scales as other important tracers of the interstellar medium, such as molecular gas and dust. The resultant image cube possesses an rms noise level of 1.1 K ( $$1.6\,\mathrm{mJy\ beam}^{-1}$$ ) $$\mathrm{per}\ 0.98\,\mathrm{km\ s}^{-1}$$ spectral channel with an angular resolution of $$30^{\prime\prime}$$ ( $${\sim}10\,\mathrm{pc}$$ ). We discuss the calibration scheme and the custom imaging pipeline that utilises a joint deconvolution approach, efficiently distributed across a computing cluster, to accurately recover the emission extending across the entire $${\sim}25\,\mathrm{deg}^2$$ field-of-view. We provide an overview of the data products and characterise several aspects including the noise properties as a function of angular resolution and the represented spatial scales by deriving the global transfer function over the full spectral range. A preliminary spatial power spectrum analysis on individual spectral channels reveals that the power law nature of the density distribution extends down to scales of 10 pc. We highlight the scientific potential of these data by comparing the properties of an outflowing high-velocity cloud with previous ASKAP+Parkes $${\rm H\small I}$$ test observations.