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This is fascinating (as an amateur astronomer), have you written anything else on the systems design of these types of instruments, or have any good pointers?
by jcurbo 9y ago
This is fascinating (as an amateur astronomer), have you written anything else on the systems design of these types of instruments, or have any good pointers? I imagine for large instruments there is a massive amount of data involved and lots of stuff to control. I know it's bad enough with just my one telescope setup :)
- fusiongyro 9y agoThere is quite a bit of technical documentation about our systems, and the code is supposed to be open-source (though a lot of it isn't publicly accessible as it should be). But I haven't written anything meant to be a high-level overview of how it works. I think I will try and do that in a few days and send you an email. I have been joking about how we should build a "total sh*t array" out of old Dish/DirecTV antennas, so that we could explore the systems design without worrying too much about whether anything could be done with the data collected. This hasn't interested my coworkers that much :) There is an amateur radio astronomy society, and there are plans for how to build various levels of radio telescope, starting from ~$50 and an old Dish receiver and going up. And our open-skies policy means that you do not have to be a professional astronomer to use our instruments, although I only know of one or two amateurs that have proposed for time. (They did get it, though). As a rough back-of-the-hand deal, we allow anybody who gets time to access about 25 MB/s of data. The correlator we have currently (WIDAR) can certainly output much more than that, up to gigabytes per second, but the rest of the infrastructure certainly can't keep up at that rate sustained. It's not unusual for an observation to top a few TB in size. ALMA data files are probably even larger on average. We are already in the early design stage for a next-generation VLA, which will increase the number of antennas to about 300. At that point, we probably won't be able to keep correlated but unprocessed raw data, just because of the sheer size of it.
- jcurbo 9y agoThanks, this is interesting! I work at JHU/APL where there are people that do similar stuff, although I don't personally. The APL Astronomy Club is actually in the midst of trying to get some of our unused scopes & equipment in better shape and possibly put to use so I'm thinking about ways to automate things. Plus I'm not happy with the state of data processing for amateurs, it seems like everything is bespoke and old freeware or expensive software packages. That is what got me thinking about how the pros do things. Looking forward to your email!