This will be the last post from the campus and observation weekend  - but beware I'm heading out to the desert to telescope array next week - more photos to come, and awesome things from the REAL observatory :)

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My observation shifts were from 2-3 to 8-9 am depending on the day - which meant that I needed to be in bed really early in order to be fully functional during the observation time. And the photo I took before heading to sleep. :)


As promised this one will be a bit technical and showing the things we play with at the Uni. So let's start with the progress of technology through time and ditching the old steem - which was still pretty but heavy, not efficient and well, old and overrun by time.

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Embracing #NEWSTEEM: lightweight still runs fast more reliable - and it is good for the environment.

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Set aside Steem story - isn't it amazing where we have come in roughly 200 years. Engineering student team has built new 4th generation solar car and the race is about to start soon  - 3000km from Darwin to Adelaide in the car powered only on solar panels. 3rd gen car won the American challenge, and the whole uni is very proud of that. 

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Back to astronomy.

How do you imagine telescope - optical ones?  that you point it to the sky and look through it by eye... well not really, not anymore.

All professional telescopes do not have eyepiece, and you can't look through it - you record the image(s) and do data reduction and play with data 
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And radio telescopes? Big dish 300m in diameter (Arecibo)? and stuff like that - well not really :)

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This is an example of MWA tile. The Murchison Widefield Array consists of 4096 dual-polarization dipole antennas optimized for the 70-300 MHz frequency, arranged as "tiles", each a 4x4 array of dipoles - consisting of 256 tiles scattered across the desert.

Of course - we still use dishes, but it is somewhat principle to have an array and lots of smaller antennas working as interferometer than one big dish. 

So my observing is starting and how does that look like - well... something like this :)

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Monitoring everything for sudden changes, checking that everything is good, and do some normal time steeming. :) 

The bottom-left screen zoomed in = during the observation of the new supernova (the process in stellar evolution which is the brief moment of the explosion of a star and several days sending off the massive shockwave through its interstellar environment). It went off 2 days before our observation schedule - and you don't miss these opportunities to observe.
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As with every instrument you have calibration object and object of interest - In the photo above I guess you can easily spot calibration one. During the observation on ever 15-20 minutes we switch to calibration object (which is in the field of view) and observe it for 2-3mins then head back to the object of interest and repeat the cycle.

Later we use this data from the calibrated object to actually know what is going on in: phase, intensity, flux, polarization and all the other stuff that we gather through this. Otherwise, you can see all the mess - nothing is useful there without 2 calibration objects (on at the start (standard star) and the one through the observation).


That would be all for now - see you soon from the observatory in desert. :)

all photos are mine, ©svemirac

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Co-founder of <a href="https://crowdmind.io">Crowdmind</a> project. 
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