Thanks to per-account emails, I can tell exactly where these people got my email from. Guess I shouldn't have expected anything less from this company

Crazy to think a customer is tracking me knowing I have another drop off!! Like chill TF out and wait for your God dam food!!. Some customers do too much man!..😒🤦🏻.

This is the first draft of the scheduling and planning system for the observatory. The workflow I imagined goes like this:

• The user is able to filter telescopes by the band of interest, or observation type when the telescope will need specialized hardware (like GOES/eventually pulsars). The telescope info link will provide more detailed information about it's configuration and capabilities.

• Using the target lookup (second picture), you can overlay the altitude of celestial objects and the limits of the telescope so you can quickly verify if/when the selected telescope is able to see your target. The proof-of-concept used for this example is fairly limited, but the goal is full range for as many telescopes as possible.

• For planned observations, the next step would be the interactive planning screen. It's designed to resemble video editing software, where you can click and drag commands from the left onto the timeline and can scrub it to see an actual simulation of what the telescope will do. The right panel displays the configurable options for the selected command.

Under the hood, the planning screen is just building a python script which saves a series of commands to be executed. This allows more commands to be added by simply defining the new function, and the panel on the right dynamically displays it's defined terms. You also have the option to bypass the interface altogether and supply the script directly (parsed for safety). I based the initial set of commands off a few used by the Green Bank Telescope in its scheduling blocks.

As always, feedback is welcome as I'm no professional astronomer and this is just my best interpretation based on what I could learn online.

Very much a work in progress, but everything pictured is functional. The limited azimuth range is due to the dish being bolted to my driveway without a lot of room, but once it's on-site it'll be capable of a full 360. I plan to do a live demo during the presentation on discord this Saturday, but it will also be recorded an posted on YouTube afterwards

There's a lot of visualizations of the Doppler effect out there, but in my opinion, none of them encompass the full picture for radio astronomy. This one includes what the telescope actually sees to help make the connection between the shifted peak on the spectrum and the relative velocity, instead of stopping the explanation at increased frequency.

Quick progress update on the proof of concept for online observations. I've got the telescope movable, but I'm waiting on a new sdr to get here from china before I can work on the actual telescope part of the telescope. The rtl-sdr I was using before was the casualty of a rogue 12v wire taking out my pi 5 :( barely had it a year so now it's running on a 3B

I'm making a proof of concept of an online radio telescope for the nonprofit observatory I started late last year. When I got this dish, it came with the original bracket which had a pivot for switching between geostationary sattelites. That was easy enough to convert to an elevation axis, but the trouble was getting it to rotate on its azimuth. Two weeks of prototyping and a spool of ASA later, and it works! The weight of the dish sits on a thrust bearing, with tightly toleranced printed spacers with low friction tape to keep it concentric while easing rotation. I'm not sure how well it will hold up, but through the magic of CAD, I'm just a couple clicks away from getting these made in a more durable material.

Here's a link to it in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h9q0Fyj6Wk4