Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment | Hacker News Reader

Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment

en.wikipedia.org

27 pointsluu6 comments

Just commenting to say that I work on this project. So let me know if anyone has any questions about it!

I don't have a question, to late to think of something smart. but look super cool and I will read some more about it. Didn't know you could do passive measurements like that.

Unfortunately cosmology and astrophysics is basically all passive measurements. Doing a controlled experiment would be more useful, but would probably remove half the fun!

I mean that you are listing to half of the night sky at once. At least that what I understood from the wikipedia page.

First: I love CHIME (and UTMOST) and all the parabolic cylinder radio telescopes out there. There's just something about the economic efficiency of a parabolic cylinder with line feeds that makes me happy.

Has the video card price boom cause any troubles for your planning of future expansion or current security?

Will you guys ever put out a quick-look full sky synthesis image like the MWA people do?

Has the recent fast radio burst boom helped out in terms of funding proposals?

Cylinders are great in a sense. As you say the efficiency is awesome, but the standing waves make life complicated!

The GPU boom is causing big issues. Future projects are targeted at where we think GPUs will be in a few years, but you can never predict the crypto induced demand, and at the moment the price and availability is causing issues.

We already do make a quick full sky image, but unfortunately it’s not public. It’s actually a way easier problem than it is for MWA. Our antennas are on a regular grid, so it’s just a dense 1D FFT in each direction and we’re done. As the CHIME FoV is so narrow we tend to actually show just one column along the meridian against time, and that produces a lovely quick map of the sky.

The FRB boom has definitely helped the funding for everyone, and it’s been very successful for CHIME. Next stop, real time localization!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com