first light!

PBS Spacetime! Not PBS Nova! I'm sorry, I got them mixed up. I have watched a lot of PBS Spacetime and Matt O'Dowd is great, he's not at all cringy "OMG physics in crisis?!!?". Give him a chance and ignore the Nova bs.

I knew (visible) light and radio waves were part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but I never connected that photons could be the non-visible part of the spectrum until this video, thank you!

I think unlike you, Jodie Foster did not have access to a Windows laptop, so instead she had to use the Fourier transform hardware in her brain to try and make sense of the raw data. Ears may not be telescopes, but they are barometers with FFT goo attached, so if you can convert photons to air pressure somehow that does enable you to perform analyses that aren't as easy to do with eyeballs alone.

Here’s something that you might have tried but just in case: I’m on the SDRPlay website right now looking at their API and downloads page. It looks like there’s a functional Mac version of the API. The SDRConnect software also seems to work on the Mac as well. Sorry I don’t have a Mac or the radio to check out myself.

I was hoping for something with a waveguide, though if it's at 20.1 MHz, that's not very realistic.

I was imagining a web/grid of wires. The picture is a little too blurry to know how close I am.

I admit I imagined some small dish setup, and of course wires can pick up radio signals too. But I guess you can't "direct" it at something, unless you build your T-wires antenna on a mobile or rotating platform. For the sun & Jupiter, they will be close enough to be unmissable when they zip by, but I have no idea at all of ... what's the furthest source you can pick up with an antenna like this? Anyway, fascinating! Thanks for the update and I'm looking forward to follow your progress.

Bell Labs wasn't built in a day.

How many birbs do it hold

Not what I pictured at all. I thought there would be a dish somewhere at least. I did guess long wires would be involved though. Looking forward to the vid!

Probably FFT, isn't that the first thing to do with almost any time series data?

Looks just like the early “Marconi Units” especially the early marine sets.

Can’t wait to see the process and the corresponding data (with your cogent interpretation). Ad Astra

I won't be happy until it looks like a scale model of Arecibo. I know it'll take a long time to trim the Bonsai just right, but it's worth it!

Pretty neat - I know someone that did this one for amateur radio astronomy: https://spaceaustralia.com/news/wheelie-bin-radio-telescope

Nearly garotted my father on a shortwave antenna like this I had draped between laundry posts, with drilled bamboo as insulators. That ended my shortwave career.

This how I felt when I got to the end of x.500 installation guide, and it said: congratulations, you are now a quipu. That was fun but difficult and rewarding. Congratulations!

I like it! That’s a cool project.

Not what I was expecting, but very cool! What frequency range does it cover? And what's the beam width? Can you steer it? Software or hardware?

So cool! I have a period logarithmic s/l band antenna on a mobile satellite dish. Need to hook it up and collect my own data.

If this is your first such antenna, and in case you haven't thought about this: you probably should get a lightning tracker app if you don't already have one. A good one will alert you when lightning is within some set radius, which is nerd-fun but also important for safety. I'm pretty sure it's best to not have that antenna connected to anything you care about, during a lightning storm :-)

Fabulous! My preconception isn't interesting. Yours is. One of my reading tactics is to not picture things that I don't have enough information to know what it's "supposed to" look like. Like, "old astronomer walking up the hill." Shall I picture a man or a woman? If I can't answer that definitely, then no, I shall not. I might tentatively picture a stick figure, or take a first person perspective, & maybe on a cautionary note ask myself whether or not I can rule out a blimp being from a gas giant planet. If no, maybe I should just get on with the story. Until the author gives me enough description to interrogate off of, it's just not an element of the story. In the end, the story may or may not be for me, but it's unfair to stuff it into a pigeonhole before I can really be sure what it's meant to be about. As for telescopes, would I have pictured LIGO, or some of the planned large space "telescopes"? Would or should anyone care what I think they will look like? In fact, maybe "Ask Dr. Collier" is simply my best shortcut to approach a problem like that.

I saw this first on my phone and didn't notice the poles in the background. That's a radio telescope? That's absolutely not what I would have pictured. I would have imagined something parabolic antenna-like.

Cool, but what did I miss? I wasn't picturing anything since I didn't know we were talking about a radio telescope... Was there a post below about it? I can't find that

I want to try this, too. Very cool.

It looks like skypipe is the strip chart viewer for time series data. Does this antenna have any sort of beamforming? I can’t tell if you’re going to have individual receive nodes or is the whole thing a single voltage source. That would make it kind of like one of those ear trumpets from old Bugs Bunny cartoons 🙂

I was picturing something more along the lines of Arecibo just scaled 5×10⁻⁴ the size. 😉

It looks like skypipe is the strip chart viewer for time series data. Does this antenna have any sort of beamforming? I can’t tell if you’re going to have individual receive nodes or is the whole thing a single voltage source. That would make it kind of like one of those ear trumpets from old Bugs Bunny cartoons 🙂

That's awesome, can we get an update as to the data when you've get it figured out.

Congratulations!!! She’s beautiful 😍

Congratulations!

Amazing! I didn't know what to expect but it was certainly more telescope-y. Excited for the video!

Using an SDR receiver for your setup? Always wanted to try that.