Seeing in radio frequencies
So it took me and my friend 2 months, but we managed to build our first radio telescope. LINK
Easily my favorite part of the whole project was at the end when we were left with an image of something, in a frequency that you will never be able to see. We were able to see satellites over 35,000km away, glowing as bright spots in the sky. To really drive the point home, we took a 360 visual image and then overlaid the radio image on top. In this way we could literally see the ring that surround the earth.
I feel like, and other variations at other frequencies would be awesome to have in something like the hololens. Being able to look around and feed in data from telescopes like this, would make staring at the sky super interesting
Easily my favorite part of the whole project was at the end when we were left with an image of something, in a frequency that you will never be able to see. We were able to see satellites over 35,000km away, glowing as bright spots in the sky. To really drive the point home, we took a 360 visual image and then overlaid the radio image on top. In this way we could literally see the ring that surround the earth.
I feel like, and other variations at other frequencies would be awesome to have in something like the hololens. Being able to look around and feed in data from telescopes like this, would make staring at the sky super interesting
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Do it! this was super fun, though if you do, maybe consider getting at leasta 90cm dish. That's the minimum requirement to see the milk way. Or use a different style antenna. If you just want to see the satellites though, this is fine. For the live image thing, if you had 7, all scanning a different bit of the sky over and over, it'd take about 3-5 minutes per image. So not quiet real time, but pretty close. Again, you'd want to use a bigger dish or you won't see anything fun. But it would be really cool. I mean that's sort of what they do at the really big observatories. Though they're looking for more specific stuff. I think it'd be really cool to try. We're planning a few big community projects to collaborate with people all over the world to do large scale stuff.
We'll be starting work on our next telescope in the next few months, so when we do I'll be sure to hop on the IRC. thanks :)
Also for the next one we'll be using an SDR and a more custom set of amplifiers and filters rather than simple off the shelf parts so we can get a better image. We also want to get a 10 foot dish to improve the resolution by a lot. Should be the bare minimum to detect pulsars as well, so it could be pretty sweet if everything works
EDIT: I mean small, like, a diameter of a few inches, maybe 6 at most. Intended for carrying around.
As a side note, as amazing as the Hololens is (in more ways than the obvious) I feel it's best use is for overlaying images on top of reality, not full VR experiences, there are other cheaper solutions for that. That said, if you could somehow keep a liveish feed, overlay that on top of an actual view of the night sky, that could be cool too. Though the Hololens itself wouldn't function well outside as it relies on its own visual light vision to properly track its position and orientation as well as it does. (I have one.) That said, I was skeptical about the technology for the longest time. Then I bought one, and although I have yet to fashion a practical use for it, it is the coolest thing since the iPhone first came out.
EDIT: I completely forgot I wanted to ask...
What IRC server/channel are you talking about? Is there a biohack.me IRC I don't [read: need to] know about?
Ya I got to try the hololens recently. While the flaws are still large and it needs more work, it was so fricken cool. I'm excited to see where the tech is in 3 years. That'll be when I buy one.
http://hackaday.com/2017/03/23/see-satellites-with-a-simple-radio-telescope/