PART Telescopes – Bringing radio astronomy within reach of rural schools | Hacker News Reader

PART Telescopes – Bringing radio astronomy within reach of rural schools

mag.openrockets.com

129 pointsopenrockets35 comments

https://parttelescopes.web.app/

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Low cost radio telescopes are great fun.

A few other similar projects:

https://astrochart.github.io/

Https://arise.seti.org/

https://wvurail.org/dspira- lessons/

https://www.haystack.mit.edu/haystack-public-outreach/srt-th...

https://pictortelescope.com/

https://github.com/0xcoto/virgo

This seems to be an essentially empty boilerplate page?

"Instructions

Access setup guides and project resources through the documentation menu. We recommend starting with installation instructions, then following the software workflow for recording and processing data from RTL-SDR devices. "

There is no "documentation menu"?

Very interesting project, I'd be interested in seeing their system architecture in more depth and what tricks they used to bring the unit cost down.

Another radio telescope project I saw a while ago """misused""" low cost universal GNSS receivers ICs (MAX2769) as their RF frontend, which I found to be novel since these chips operate in a weird performance regime of low resolution (1- or 2-bit output) but very high sensitivity.

Is the telescope design available anywhere for hobbyists to build? I can't seem to find anything in the article or in a separate search. I'd be interested in perhaps putting one of these together to do radio astronomy with my kids.

Maybe you like this:

https://physicsopenlab.org/2020/10/10/a-simple-11-2-ghz-radi...

The HN discussion (2020) about this can be found there:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26078761

edit: It looks like NASA is back selling Radio JOVE kits again. So this might be your only turnkey choice. It uses 2x large wire dipoles for 20.1 MHz for receiving Jupiter/Io radio bursts which you just view in a spectrogram on a computers (includes SDR receiver): https://radiojove.gsfc.nasa.gov/kits/

I think the SETI "Horn of Plenty" design is a pretty good way to get started with kids. The antenna itself uses metalized foam board with copper (or even aluminum tape) to make a pyramidal horn. Making the waveguide out of folded aluminum siding is a bit more kid dangerous (tin snips cutting sheet metal). And the actual antenna is a monopole feed placed in the waveguide. You'll still probably need an cheap ebay low noise amplifier, less cheap hydrogen line bandpass filter, a SDR receiver with a couple MHz instantaneous bandwidth and a computer. Cheap RTL-SDR usb receivers aren't great at 1420 MHz but they do work if you have a good filter. You'll have to decide on the receiver based on the processing toolchain you chose and it's requirements. Examples using GNU Radio https://github.com/ccera-astro or https://wvurail.org/dspira-lessons/

The "science" output of this isn't very exciting to kids as it's just a spectrum plot for a point in the sky at the time showing how fast towards or away from us some of the hydrogen is going. But if you do it over many full sidereal days at different elevations and record the elevation w/time then you can make a nice looking "image" of the sky showing something useful.

If your kids are older and ambitious take a look at the STARE2 project for detecting fast radio bursts which does actual honest to goodness publishable (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2872-x) radio astronomy with a meter scale horn+receiver setup. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/magnificent-burst-within-... https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.05077 The secret sauce of STARE2 is math heavy calibration though.

I couldn't find the link that they mentioned too. Maybe they forgot to actually put it?

Search on “diy radio telescope”, that gave me lots of projects and videos

Along the same lines: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6552/ad0542

What an awesome story. Not too many stories about Aussies out there, but what Han brothers are doing with Unsloth in AI, and stories like this one, makes this fellow Aussie super proud!

I had no idea those dan and the team were aussies! damn nice, we dont really seem to shine in tech on the world stage.

I'm in the long process (slow due to competing priorities) of building an 18" visual telescope because the views can be really cool and beautiful. Plus it blows my mind that I might be able to hand grind something to see light from deep space that could be thousands of years old.

So, my question is, are there any cool things I can do with a radio telescope that have that same sort of intrinsic cool/wow factor?

I would have been all over this if we had one of these when I was in school. Very cool project.

Honestly at $500 I still want one. I’d love to see the design open sourced!

fwiw pangram says it is 100% generated

Can we have more stories like this on the front page please!

Story didn't teach me much about how these things work, what the challenges are, etc.

The vast majority of these kinds of stories are complete bunk.

Regardless of its bunk coefficient this is still exciting and inspiring, especially for students or low resourced people.

If I understood correctly they mean that these uplifting stories end up not panning out and it’s more about publicity than accomplishing the thing. I’m genuinely curious about the kind of SDR that works for a price like this and how you fit it into a $500 BOM.

I think that might be a bit harsh. Have there been scams on Kickstarter and other type places? Sure. Are all of them scams? Doubtful. Some people just have no experience creating a viable company selling a product that they designed. It takes people by surprise by how expensive and difficult it can be. Sadly, they find out the hard way after spending all of the money raised on redesigns and other unexpected deviations from the happy path original plan. That does not mean they were a scam from the start though

I hate to say it, but this is correct.

Who in the world would have the expertise to operate one of these? In a “low resource” high school? The problem isn’t (just) having the equipment.

There are so few teachers with enough knowledge to engage. Well-resourced, highly motivated kids might be able to read on line, but that’s a real stretch for the rest.

Why? What do you mean by “bunk?” Do you have any examples you can point to?

Call me cynical, but pretty much 100% if the time when there is an article about "teen accomplishes almost impossible scientific feat" or "group of teens design world-saving product costing pennies", it turns out to be a disingenuous narrative pushed by some adult with an ulterior motive and often deep pockets.

The complete lack of details in the article does not do anything for its credibility.

We're so sorry - the article was independently composed. We wanted to release it later after we finished our documentation but it seems that it was posted without our knowledge. FYI we are led by a Dr. David Pulford who is currently also helping us in the project, so I wouldn't be worried about our "credibility". We are also sponsored by the InterACT ACT and the IBO, if that helps. Anyhow we are planning to publish to Phy. Ed (IOP - same journal on which CHART is composed) so I hope you will come back later after we finish!

It's a shame the title was so interesting, but not enough for a person to spend time write something about it in the body. Not just as a compare and contrast, but as a meaningful conveyance of the story and details. That's where a real article comes in - to be more than just an expansion of the original prompt.

Does anyone know if there is an official site/repo/page for this project somewhere with info about the actual design?

https://parttelescopes.web.app/

Thanks, we updated the link.

that page is essentially empty, and refers to a "documentation menu" that doesn't seem to be present?

Hi, Yanfu here.

Documentation is not ready yet so it is still empty.

However, you can have a look at our repositories in our github.

We just want to ensure quality control before we post anything like that up. Also this post was posted without us knowing beforehand, so what you guys are seeing is still incomplete. Sorry!

Hi Yanfu, we'd love to have this on HN again when the documentation and site is ready. Please email us (hn@ycombinator.com) to let us know when it's ready or beforehand so we can plan it with you.

> Access setup guides and project resources through the documentation menu. We recommend starting with installation instructions, then following the software workflow for recording and processing data from RTL-SDR devices.

But there is no "documentation menu" that I can find.

100% AI generated (and probably by someone affiliated with said team -- for the purposes of college apps)

In Australia (at least 15 years ago) you sit your exams and get a score. The universities then set a minimum score for each program based on expected enrollment and capacity. If your score is above the program score, you're in automatically. You only go through the American style interviews if you come in slightly below the bar and are hoping for secondary consideration. These highschool students are probably going to have no problem with their scores, so this is a moot point.

Yanfu here - I'm one of the contributors.

I beg to differ here, respectfully. The core text, hero-sections and the background etc. were all designed manually by us. We used AI for the rest as a boilerplate. SO far our main target was not to build the website, and thus it was hastily set up. Our core systems is finished, you can look at our github page. We actually have a participant school ready for our delivery, and this Wednesday we have a meeting with them to discuss specifics. I will not disclose it right now but you will see soon enough in our social medias.

Also, about college apps: in Australia, we use the UAC to apply and it's solely based on our ATAR and not extracurriculars. So we are not just doing it for "college apps". Just to clarify.

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