I How feasible is home radio astronomy?

[berkeman]

will make my neighbors sad.

Or mad. Do they already have their own Tiki Torches...?

 

[Baluncore]

Why collect and combine a year, when it can all be done in 12 hours?

Because a 15m disk is awkward, expensive and will make my neighbors sad.

It will certainly be more interesting, Doppler adjusting the pulse rate, then accumulating the time shifted pulses through the different seasons.

 

[ohwilleke]

TL;DR Summary: Is a homemade radio telescope realistic?

Is a homemade radio telescope realistic?

There seems to be a confluence of multiple technologies that makes the situation better than when I was a wee lad: software-defined radio (SDR), the easy availability of satellite dishes, surveillance drives, and fast CPUs.

Let's take a step back - it is trivial to see the sun in radio. An old analog TV, a set of "rabbit ears" antenna, and you're good to go. Point the antenna at the sun (i.e. the ears are perpendicular to it) and there is noticeably more snow and static than when pointing it away from the sun (i.e. lines up with it). But I am looking to see what else can be done.

I imagine getting a couple of DishTV dishes, and mounting them in the corners of my house or yard,. This gives the directionality of a house or yard sized dish, but of course not the sensitivity. Ballpark a few degree resolution for the array (more like 30 for one dish) It is likely easier to point with phase than with motors. Use SDR as receivers, record every night to disk and "stack" days or weeks of exposure together. Because its SDR you can look, e.g. on and off the 21 cm peak and map out hydrogen.

FWIW, the EDGES 21cm radio-telescope, which has gotten very serious academic and scientific attention, was very basic and could have been done as a home astronomy project. A picture of it is at their website:

Of course, part of this boils down to where your home is. A critical feature of this radio-telescope is that it is located in "a radio-quiet zone in western Australia". The EDGES group is building a sister radio-telescope in "radio-quiet—Devon Island in Nunavut, Canada".

So, if you live in the middle of nowhere, this can work. If you live in the East Village of Manhattan, on the other hand, don't bother. The local radio background noise will dwarf anything interesting you can pick up from space aside from the Sun.

 

[Baluncore]

So, if you live in the middle of nowhere, this can work. If you live in the East Village of Manhattan, on the other hand, don't bother. The local radio background noise will dwarf anything interesting you can pick up from space aside from the Sun.

That is one experimental antenna element being evaluated. I believe there will be two in the array, separated by 150 metres. That makes it an interferometer for low-band VHF. While the elements are low-profile, the array is ten times larger than a 15-metre dish.