Breaking free from Campus & Uni (part 3)

avatar
(Edited)

This will be the last post from the campus and observation weekend - but beware I'm heading out to the desert to telescope array next week - more photos to come, and awesome things from the REAL observatory :)

My observation shifts were from 2-3 to 8-9 am depending on the day - which meant that I needed to be in bed really early in order to be fully functional during the observation time. And the photo I took before heading to sleep. :)

As promised this one will be a bit technical and showing the things we play with at the Uni. So let's start with the progress of technology through time and ditching the old steem - which was still pretty but heavy, not efficient and well, old and overrun by time.



Embracing #NEWSTEEM: lightweight still runs fast more reliable - and it is good for the environment.


Set aside Steem story - isn't it amazing where we have come in roughly 200 years. Engineering student team has built new 4th generation solar car and the race is about to start soon - 3000km from Darwin to Adelaide in the car powered only on solar panels. 3rd gen car won the American challenge, and the whole uni is very proud of that.


Back to astronomy.

How do you imagine telescope - optical ones? that you point it to the sky and look through it by eye... well not really, not anymore.

All professional telescopes do not have eyepiece, and you can't look through it - you record the image(s) and do data reduction and play with data

And radio telescopes? Big dish 300m in diameter (Arecibo)? and stuff like that - well not really :)

This is an example of MWA tile. The Murchison Widefield Array consists of 4096 dual-polarization dipole antennas optimized for the 70-300 MHz frequency, arranged as "tiles", each a 4x4 array of dipoles - consisting of 256 tiles scattered across the desert.

Of course - we still use dishes, but it is somewhat principle to have an array and lots of smaller antennas working as interferometer than one big dish.

So my observing is starting and how does that look like - well... something like this :)


Monitoring everything for sudden changes, checking that everything is good, and do some normal time steeming. :)

The bottom-left screen zoomed in = during the observation of the new supernova (the process in stellar evolution which is the brief moment of the explosion of a star and several days sending off the massive shockwave through its interstellar environment). It went off 2 days before our observation schedule - and you don't miss these opportunities to observe.


As with every instrument you have calibration object and object of interest - In the photo above I guess you can easily spot calibration one. During the observation on ever 15-20 minutes we switch to calibration object (which is in the field of view) and observe it for 2-3mins then head back to the object of interest and repeat the cycle.

Later we use this data from the calibrated object to actually know what is going on in: phase, intensity, flux, polarization and all the other stuff that we gather through this. Otherwise, you can see all the mess - nothing is useful there without 2 calibration objects (on at the start (standard star) and the one through the observation).

That would be all for now - see you soon from the observatory in desert. :)

all photos are mine, ©svemirac

Co-founder of Crowdmind project.
Curie witness and crowdwitness operator. Proud member of steemSTEM community.
If you happen to have some free witness votes, don't be shy to cast on these ones, we are ranked as 68th and 17th respectively; as well as stem.witness.



0
0
0.000
16 comments
avatar

Wow that equipment looks super high tech. It's very interesting. Your trip to the desert sounds awesome. I look forward to seeing some pictures! I bet the stars and sky would be phenomenal without all of the light pollution from the towns and cities.

Posted using Partiko Android

0
0
0.000
avatar

The sky is awesome, sadly I don't have any proper photo equipment at the moment to even try to capture it... :) camera on smartphone is just too bad for any night photos; not to mention the starry nights :) but if someone brings the camera; will try to snatch it for few long exposure shots - and who knows :)

0
0
0.000
avatar

Yeah I dont think that a smartphone would quite cut it for that. Maybe I'll just have to read the written description of the experience :)

Posted using Partiko Android

0
0
0.000
avatar
(Edited)

I wish you the best at the observatory ^^ come back to us with some really nice news, hehe ;)

0
0
0.000
avatar

Thanks, will try to - will be hard with all the work, but there is always time for few photos :)

0
0
0.000
avatar

That looks awesome!

Out of curiosity - what would be the usual ratio between time spend observing and analysing collected data afterwards?

0
0
0.000
avatar

I do not agree with your question. :))

With radio observations, we want to go for 12hours coverage of one object, in continuity. And with data analysis - Depends what you get from the observed image - is it clean and easy to process...
it's well, do you get it right the first time - or you mess up something, or you are not satisfied with the outcome so you want to try different settings for data reduction.

Recently I dug up some raw observational data from 2005 - well, found some crazy stuff that no one has detected anything similar in the nearby universe yet...

So, observations take usually 12 hours per object or if you are clouds with mosaic - we tend to observe for more than 24hours in (12/8hrs periods) and then combine all these images in one big map.
And again a lot of time goes into checking out what we got - and usually if you find something interesting; you then apply for observation with either different radio telescope(different frequency) or optical/x-ray and stuff like that.

Didn't answer your question, but it really depends on lots of things - but usually it's more than observation :)

0
0
0.000
avatar

I understand it depends on lots of things :) But like, you go there once in a week, month, three months, year?

0
0
0.000
avatar

Whatever happened to Sputnik…?!?!?!?!?

0
0
0.000
avatar

Sputnik is sleeping with aliens now.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Awwwwww….I DO hope the little Angel is having bed-time lullabies sung to it while laying at rest.

0
0
0.000