Does anyone have any experience home brewing a radio telescope? I’d really like to make one myself, both because it seems fun and challenging, and because it would probably be cheaper than buying one of there are any consumer grade radio scopes. I’m aware of some tutorials online, and one concern that I have is that many of them are intended to output data to software. I’d like to convert the signal into something audible, so that people can actually hear the emissions. The three targets I have in mind are: the sun, Jupiter (like the JOVE project), and hydrogen emission frequencies from nebulae. Ultimately, my goal is public outreach and education rather than amateur research.
I have next to no experience working with radio anything except old AM/FM receivers and walkies. I also know next to nothing about how radio telescopes work, so if you have a particularly good resource besides googling it, I’d be greatly obliged. My questions are: did you find building/using the telescope difficult or expensive? Did you find that it was worthwhile / would you do it again? And what advice do you have for someone looking at it for public outreach?
I dunno if you meant to link to a sub instead of a user, but that’s what I’m seeing. That sounds awesome! Thanks for sharing!
She’s very popular and I would imagine gets lots of messages. I’m not sure if she would prefer to have you message her directly or post on the subreddit. Either way, Andromeda321 is the real deal. Good luck! Be sure to post your pics here, I bet they’ll be real cool!
Awesome, thanks! Don’t hold your breath, though. Right now, this thing is paying for itself, and it’s not much. My first goal is to get a used DSLR so I can take promotional pictures. I know it’s a manually slewed scope, but I’m not trying to take crazy multi-hour exposures, I’m trying to show what people might expect to see IRL, and take promotional shots of people on the class. Then, I’ll probably look at making the radio telescope rig more seriously, hopefully before summer.