Tagged: PICTOR

Conference Talk on PICTOR A Free-to-Use Open Source Radio Telescope based on RTL-SDR

At this years FOSDEM 2020 conference Apostolos Spanakis-Misirlis has presented a talk on his PICTOR open source radio telescope project. We have posted about PICTOR in the past [1, 2] as it makes use of an RTL-SDR dongle for the radio observations. The PICTOR website and GitHub page provide all the information you need to build your own Hydrogen line radio telescope, and you can also access their free to use observation platform, where you can make an observation using Apostolos' own 3.2m dish radio telescope in Greece.

The PICTOR radio telescope allows a user to measure hydrogen line emissions from our galaxy. Neutral Hydrogen atoms randomly emit photons at a wavelength of 21cm (1420.4058 MHz). The emissions themselves are very rare, but since our galaxy is full of hydrogen atoms the aggregate effect is that a radio telescope can detect a power spike at 21cm. If the telescope points to within the plane of our galaxy (the milky way), the spike becomes significantly more powerful since our galaxy contains more hydrogen than the space between galaxies. Radio astronomers are able to use this information to determine the shape and rotational speed of our own galaxy.

PICTOR: A free-to-use open source radio telescope

CygnusRFI: New RFI Analysis Tool for Ground Stations and Radio Telescopes

Thank you to Apostolos for submitting information about his new open source program called "CygnusRFI". CygnusRFI is a tool designed for analyzing radio frequency interference (RFI) with a focus on how it affects satellite ground stations and radio telescopes. We note that in the past we've posted several times about Apostolos' other project called PICTOR, which is an open source radio telescope platform that makes use of RTL-SDR dongles. 

Apostolos explains CygnusRFI in the following: 

CygnusRFI is an easy-to-use open-source Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) analysis tool, based on Python and GNU Radio Companion (GRC) that is conveniently applicable to any ground station/radio telescope working with a GRC-supported software-defined radio (SDR). In addition to data acquisition, CygnusRFI also carries out automated analysis of the recorded data, producing a series of averaged spectra covering a wide range of frequencies of interest. CygnusRFI is built for ground station operators, radio astronomers, amateur radio operators and anyone who wishes to get an idea of how "radio-quiet" their environment is, using inexpensive instruments like SDRs.

CygnusRFI Screenshots
CygnusRFI Screenshots

Updates on the PICTOR Low Cost Open Source Radio Telescope Based on RTL-SDR

Back in July we posted about PICTOR, an open source and RTL-SDR based radio telescope project. The owner of the project recently wrote in and wanted to share some updates. His text is below:

A few months ago, PICTOR was launched. PICTOR is a free to use open source radio telescope that allows anyone to observe the sky in the 1300~1700 MHz range at any time via the easy-to-use online platform.

The goal of this effort is to introduce students, educators, astronomers and others to the majesty of the radio sky, promoting radio astronomy education, without the need of building a large and expensive radio telescope. 

Since the initial launch, PICTOR has gotten lots of updates and improvements, particularly in the software backend, providing more data to the users, using advanced techniques to increase the signal-to-noise ratio by calibrating spectra and mitigating radio frequency interference (RFI) (if present).

Here is an example observation with PICTOR, clearly showing the detection of 3 hydrogen-dense regions corresponding to 3 unique spiral arms in the Milky Way!

Graphs from the PICTOR RTL-SDR Radio Telescope showing the 3 unique spiral arms in the Milky Way.
Graphs from the PICTOR RTL-SDR Radio Telescope showing the 3 unique spiral arms in the Milky Way.

If you’re new to radio-astronomy, the developer of PICTOR has provided a PDF including some introductory radio astronomy information and instructions on how to observe the radio sky with PICTOR: https://www.pictortelescope.com/Observing_the_radio_sky_with_PICTOR.pdf