Amateur Radio Astronomy

Is there any astronomy club in Ireland that has actually partaken in Radio Astronomy?

Astro2 in conjunciton with TASS (not TAS) did come succesful radio dopler observations of the Leonids a few years ago. It was good fun but the equipment belonged to TASS and since they seem to have taken a VERY downward turn the last few years we never got round to doing it again.

Pitty really.

Hi, Seanie,
With the computing power thats around these days, maybe you could "plug" the radio telesacope into acomputer and do frequency/spectrum analysis ??, are there any facts you could derive from the radio noise of meteors or Jupiter, such as composition, altitude or velocity ???

With the meteor noise, I presume you could receive a signal from meteros which were well below the naked eye brightness ???

Yes to all the above (apart from composition of meteors, dont think you can get that from a bounced signal)

www.imo.net/radio/ is a good place to start reading on this.

Cheers,
~Al

are there any facts you could derive from the radio noise of meteors or Jupiter, such as composition, altitude or velocity ???

Al's right Dave, you can't derive any kind of analysis from the noises picked up. Although with meteor noise obervations, if you had a strong or long burst, that would indicate a very strongly bounced signal, thus a large meteor leaving a prolonged ionised tail would have just zipped by. The stronger and longer the signal would probably mean a fireball, and possibly something that survived 're'entry.

With Jupiter and Io, its more for fun to pick it up than any real analysis. I think it can almost be used as a beacon effect like a pulsar - when its heard, it must be in line-of-site. Then if you could confirm it visually, THAT would be a nice challenge!

The noise that Jupiter and Io makes is like listening to waves on a sea shore, they wave in and out, about 4 seconds apart, but again, only when in or around the line-of-site.

I remember when TAS had a Perseid Bar-B-Q in 1995 (I think it was), and we brought out all the radio gear in Bob's van, out to our observing site. Myslef, Sean MacKenna, Bob Campbell, and Sean Robbins stood around to see the meteors that wold match the radio bursts. Sean Mac saw one extremely bright one go across the sky and burst in 2 and burn up, and we got a 7 second FM and almost stereo signal of what sounded like a current affairs broadcast about Bill Clinton from America!

So, amateur radio astronomy can be cool!

Seanie.

Seanie / Al,
Those noises of Jupiter sound real cool, if not a bit spooky.
Did you manage to record any of the sounds onto a tape ??
Recording the comet shoemaker/levy impact in 1996 would have been excellent, you could have pinpointed the exact time of impact with it, and see how long the "explosion" lasted etc... (as long as Jupiter was above the horizon).

Seanie,
Did you manage to record any of the sounds onto a tape ??
Recording the comet shoemaker/levy impact in 1996 would have been excellent, you could have pinpointed the exact time of impact with it, and see how long the "explosion" lasted etc... (as long as Jupiter was above the horizon).

Dave,
Sean Mac did make recordings of the Jupiter/Io conjunctions, and I will ask him where they are. It might be a good idea for him to now put them to cd and keep tham on record.

As for the S-L9 impacts, I don't think many amateurs would have been able to pick up those signals! I think some were detected, but only by powerful instruments at the time. And also, no all the impacts were 'heard' as some occured on the dark side.

Would you want to hear the recordings if Sean Mac can get them out of the old dusty boxes?

Seanie.