3 ms·

Measuring galactic velocities with a USB TV tuner [pdf]

• mdturnerphys 13y ago
  Summary here: http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-for-budget-radio-astronomy/ http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-for-budget-radio-astronomy/
• lifeisstillgood 13y ago
  Aw c'mon - perfect HN faire for a long weekend Astronomy has always pushed humans onwards and its great that these things are within reach of a school or kids budget and its what we their parents need to be boneing up on (as well as phonetic spelling and new ways to learn arithmetic) Fantastic stuff, didn't understand one word in three. Please do a MakeMag special
• andrewcooke 13y ago
  has the link changed? it doesn't describe measuring galactic rotation (does it?) (and how do you do that with the hydrogen line? what frequency accuracy do you need?) but as it says in the conclusions, this is way cool. as part of my degree i used equipment from early radio work - my results were similar (well, worse - all i could see was the sun and cas a) but used a bed-sized aerial, fancy switching (tube?) amplifiers (that used ~20U rack space, in todays units), and lots of liquid N2 (i guess it was a bolometer? can't remember any details...)
  • mdturnerphys 13y ago
    The paper doesn't specifically talk about galactic rotation, but it does demonstrate the measurement of velocities via the Doppler shift. Take a look at the plot on pg. 12, that shows "a 'triple humped' spectral structure, indicating that at the time of the observation, there were three distinct hydrogen clouds within the field-of-view of the radio telescope." I'll correct the title.