For the month of March, we propose to bring the SKAO telescopes in your classroom!
http://astroedu.iau.org/en/activities/2404/skao-and-the-mysteries-of-invisible-light/ is a collection of activities to learn about the existence of light beyond what humans can see with their eyes, and how these invisible types of light provide astronomers with a new view of the Universe. Using laboratory equipment, students will experiment with infrared light, detect the existence of radio waves, and understand the basic principles of signal collection and data transfer of telescopes. They will also learn how all this is related to the Square Kilometre Array Observatory (SKAO), the largest radio telescope in the world, currently under construction in remote areas of South Africa and Australia.
A short picture thread from yesterday's expedition to Raisting Earth Station, in freezing fog (-12℃) and being completely alone there. This station (opened in 1963, still one of the largest in the world) enabled satellite comms between Norh America & Europe for the very 1st time and then was also used for transmitting the moon landing and the 1972 Munich Olympics...
The foggy weather and flat light was almost exactly as I'd hoped for (and been patiently waiting & planning for). It absolutely emphasized the artificiality of these structures in the surrounding landscape. Also loved the design, scale and architecture of some of the antennas. A pretty special place & experience - we shall return!
It's described as "the largest radiotelescope in the world which can operate at the lowest frequencies that can be observed from earth" and it's about a thousand km wide, which makes it a nice example of peaceful international scientific cooperation.
PICTOR is a publicly accessible, free to use, open source radio telescope.
This is pretty cool. Over the past few days I submitted a couple of observing requests which haven't been processed yet, looking forward to getting the data.
"The Parkes radio telescope Murriyang, which helped broadcast the moon landing in 1969, has played a central role in another scientific discovery.
CSIRO scientists working at Murriyang have been observing an array of nano hertz frequency pulsars for almost 20 years. They are ripples in space time [gravitational waves] that are nearly the same size as the Milky Way.
It turns out Starlink doesn't just mess ground-based optical #space observation, it does so for radio observation as well. Due to wavelength, thus required antenna size, radio observatorys are nearly universally ground-based - there are no Hubbles or JWSTs for radio spectrum. https://newatlas.com/space/spacexs-starlink-satellites-leaking-radio-signals/
Because I am prone to forgetting and losing things, I thought I’d build a small journal of materials and tasks involved in the creation of a home radio telescope. This is a work in progress...