A Spherical Harmonic Approach to Redshift Distortion and a Measurement of Omega from the 1.2 Jy IRAS Redshift Survey

We present a formalism for analysing redshift distortions based on a spherical harmonic expansion of the density field. We use a maximum likelihood estimator for the combination of density and bias parameters, ${\mathrm{\Omega }}^0.6\mathrm{/}b$. We test the method with $N$-body simulations and apply it to the 1.2 Jy IRAS redshift survey.