The Sun from cloudy Scotland

This is a composite image of the sun using the combined data of 2 groups of pupils. I do not think that they understood what the final image would look like or how much data would be required to produce an image.  The result is quite pleasing.

Delta Aquarids?

Yesterday late afternoon showed the sort of signal I was expecting from meteors.  At around midnight there was a longer lasting event.

The night before had nothing to show on it.  This is what most of my data looks like, I need to find some data to confirm my readings.

The Perseid meteor shower will peak on 12th August and this should be more intense than the Delta Aquarids.  It will be interesting to make the comparison between them.

Delta Aquarids

Last night was a bad night for observing meteors too many clouds so delighted that my over the horizon radio system seems to have picked up all the action.  For over a month I have detected next to nothing but now we are in meteor season I am expecting lots more like this.  All of the null data when there was nothing much happening validates this observation.  I will post tomorrow the results of tonight's observations.

East to West sky image

Not much to look at yet but this is the East to West image of the sky in microwave wavelengths. The altitude is 22 degrees. Each bright line is the signal from a satellite. This is a one pixel wide image and the very slow plan is to increase the altitude and do it again repeatedly until we have a map of half the sky.  This reminds me of watching pictures slowly appear on old school dial up internet connections. 

First Something

After days of just background hiss this morning when I checked on the ionosphere experiment I found a blip that was exactly what I expected to see. 1 minute and 34 seconds of tuned into a radio station I cannot usually connect to.  This should be because of a disturbance in the ionosphere.  What caused it? Space Weather told me that there was very little going on and less than a 1% chance of anything at all.  I can't wait for the Delta Aquariids in late July to find out if this is what a meteorite looks like.

Set-up Details

I have been asked to give a bit more detail of the setup for my satellite dish telescope.   I purchased the satellite signal detector from Amazon

The detector and the LNB require 13V (a range of voltages work. I have not tested the limits) to work.  This is usually supplied by the receiver box so has to be supplied.  This is my set up in bench testing, looking a bit crude but working.  The bent paper lip is at +13V the core of the coax from the LNB is pushed into the connector.

To turn this into a measurable signal I used an old crystal microphone an amplifier board and a multimeter that could measure a.c. In the mV range.  I would say that all of this equipment has been in the school since the 1980s. 

It would be easy to use a computer mic and a laptop to do the same job but this looks like science to the pupils.  Each measurement has to be done by hand so the pupils have a better feeling of how the system works.

To identify the satellites we use LyngSat.com which has details of satellite positions relative to your position and info on what channels they carry, this seems to be the most fascinating bit to the pupils.

Interesting double spike in hiss

The FM radio data is hard to interpret and I have to confess that I do not know what I am looking at.  After a couple of days of hiss and the occasional but regular small spike, which I think is just local noise, I found these interesting spikes.  The two spikes had a very high amplitude.  The background hiss has an average of 880 on the y scale (I have not found out the units yet so don't red pen me) the spikes went up to 11880 for the first and 13845 the lows in the dips were around 40.  I think that the lows are caused by locking onto a carrier wave and could terfore be an indication that my experiment is working.  The dips lasted around 2.5 seconds and were separated by 24 seconds.  I have no idea what I detected.