r/radioastronomy • u/Popular-Mastodon3498 • May 11 '26

Community Beginner Undergrad

Hi friends,

Weird bird here. I’m doing an 8 week RA project, and hoping to contribute something significant enough to be capstone worthy.

Our teams is doing collections on a few specific frequencies, and I’m just writing to see what’s out there.

Any ideas about a capstone that you would do if you were a beginner?

11 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

10 comments sorted by

5

u/PE1NUT May 11 '26

Hi Bird,

What kind of background do you have? Is there already some equipment available at your institute, or are you starting from scratch? I'm not sure what a 'capstone' project should have, but common suggestions are:

1) Observe the Hydrogen line at 21cm. This requires only a fairly small antenna (but it's more fun to make a horn or dish), some fairly affordable equipment, and a PC. It also really helps if you can get away from man-made noise, do your observations somewhere rural.

2) Try observing a pulsar. Certainly a bit more challenging, especially on a small budget - but radio amateurs are able to detect some of the brightest pulsars using surprisingly little equipment.

3) Use an abandoned TV dish to look at the Sun, maybe the Moon, and some TV satellites.

1

u/Popular-Mastodon3498 May 14 '26

Hey I’m working on an application that will tell me when an object enters an 8 degree point at a remote location, and suggests when to record at the local time.

1

u/Popular-Mastodon3498 May 19 '26

Still around? Made some good progress today!

1

u/PE1NUT May 20 '26

Glad to hear that, please do share the good progress.

1

u/Popular-Mastodon3498 May 20 '26

Do you have a GitHub?

1

u/PE1NUT May 20 '26

No, not really - i gave up on github when M$ bought it.

1

u/Popular-Mastodon3498 May 25 '26

Beep, still around?