The picture above is a photo of Hydrogen emissions from our galaxy. The great thing about this photo is it wasn’t taken with millions of dollars worth of equipment; instead, only a few hundred dollars worth of ham radio gear was needed to get a photo of the Milky Way. [Shanni Prutchi], with the assist of her dad [David] developed this radio telescope in 5th grade, as well as even provided a presentation on this develop at the national Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Instead of a gigantic satellite dish, [Shanni] utilized a loop yagi antenna to gather radio signals in the 1420 MHz band. These signals are amplified, filtered, as well as sent to an ICOM IC R-7000 receiver specially customized by [Shanni]’s dad for radio astronomy.
After her telescope saw very first light, [Shanni] as well as [David] decided to utilize their brand new toy to find the passage of the sun. At around 10:00 am they directed the telescope at where the sun would be at 1:30 pm. For the next few hours, the telescope gathered as well as integrated radio signals to make an remarkable graph. Yep, [Shanni]’s range can find radio waves coming directly from the sun.
Like a great deal of us, [Shanni] was extremely much influenced by the movie Contact, something we brought up last week in a publish on software-defined radio telescopes. This telescope was developed in 2005, meaning [Shanni] couldn’t take advantage of any type of of the new advances in affordable software application radios. We’re still waiting on somebody to throw a Realtek SDR telescope together, so if you’ve got one send it in