Radio Telescopes and Nobel Laureates
Posted: Fri Apr 04, 2014 1:32 pmGot invited to a reception tomorrow an hour and a half out from where I live for the reopening of the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory- the astute amongst you might recall that my first article in Sky & Telescope was on the telescope, hence scoring an invite to the swanky reception. How swanky? Well Joe Taylor who won the Nobel Prize in 1993 is going to be there- turns out he's retired but he's a big Ham radio buff, so that wins out. 
Contemplating now how much to dress up for the occasion- I'm gonna bike the last few miles from the train station instead of taking a cab, so probably nice trousers and top kinda thing. (I'm also coincidentally meeting my adviser's family for the first time, so don't want to look shabby for that either.)
Also, this is super fun, the big thing the group at this telescope does is EME- moonbounce where you send/receive signals via Ham radio. The reason this is interesting is the past few days my group has been in email discussion on whether the Dwingeloo guys could send signals that we could in turn receive on our radio telescope to test transient signal detection- cause hey, the Morse code dots and dashes are that! So for CiD if he's read this far, right now I think the real trick is we'd need to have them send the signal in the 6 meter band as that's the only one that corresponds with our low frequency telescope, which is clearly a bit of a trick in itself for EME as no one normally does it there. But man oh man it'd be a nice chapter in my thesis if we could get this off the ground! (Idea we are proposing tomorrow to them is send a few signals of varying amplitudes at a given time so we see if we see them, and then do a test where they send stuff within a few hours but not tell us when specifically it is. Fingers crossed we can work this out!
Contemplating now how much to dress up for the occasion- I'm gonna bike the last few miles from the train station instead of taking a cab, so probably nice trousers and top kinda thing. (I'm also coincidentally meeting my adviser's family for the first time, so don't want to look shabby for that either.)
Also, this is super fun, the big thing the group at this telescope does is EME- moonbounce where you send/receive signals via Ham radio. The reason this is interesting is the past few days my group has been in email discussion on whether the Dwingeloo guys could send signals that we could in turn receive on our radio telescope to test transient signal detection- cause hey, the Morse code dots and dashes are that! So for CiD if he's read this far, right now I think the real trick is we'd need to have them send the signal in the 6 meter band as that's the only one that corresponds with our low frequency telescope, which is clearly a bit of a trick in itself for EME as no one normally does it there. But man oh man it'd be a nice chapter in my thesis if we could get this off the ground! (Idea we are proposing tomorrow to them is send a few signals of varying amplitudes at a given time so we see if we see them, and then do a test where they send stuff within a few hours but not tell us when specifically it is. Fingers crossed we can work this out!