r/radioastronomy

Hi all, my son has been obsessed with space pretty much his whole life and recently he mentioned he would like to use a radio telescope. I'm attempting to re-use an older internet dish for a cheapish DIY project we can do together. I've done a bunch of google and youtube watching, I think I pretty much get the gist of it once there is an RF signal out of the antenna, but I'm not quite sure what I need to do to get the RF signal in the first place. Most of the material just says to attach the feed to the LNA, but what does a "feed" look like?

Attached are a few pictures of the dish/antenna. I have a Nooelec SAWbird+ H1 and NooelecRTL-SDR V5 so far. Is there something I can stick into the "head" I have here or do I need to replace it with something else?

Recent observations performed by an international team of astronomers have revealed a surprising phenomenon: the exact same black hole launched jets with drastically different velocities, ranging from mildly relativistic to hyper-fast speeds, across successive state transitions.

The new discovery made by a group of researchers led by Callan M. Wood of Curtin University in Australia challenges long-held astrophysics assumptions that static properties like a black hole’s mass, spin, or alignment dictate the speed of its material ejections, suggesting that the dynamic environment surrounding these cosmic engines plays a far more volatile role than previously imagined.

The findings are a result of intensive radio and X-ray tracking of Swift J1727.8-1613, a low-mass X-ray binary (LMXB) with a stellar-mass black hole roughly 10,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Ophiuchus. When the system violently awakened in late 2023, triggering one of the brightest X-ray outbursts ever recorded, astronomers turned global radio arrays toward the spectacle. By resolving nine distinct “knots” (dense clouds of superheated plasma hurled into interstellar space) the team reconstructed the black hole’s ejection history frame by frame, capturing a level of physical detail rarely seen in such systems.

“What made the system particularly interesting was that our subsequent observations coincided with sudden bright X-ray and radio flares, indicating rapid changes both in the material flowing towards the black hole and in the radio jet. We therefore continued monitoring the source as it went through multiple X-ray and radio flares,” Wood told Universelost.com.

>Read more<

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

The full article can be viewed at deepspace1420.com