The Outsider's Inside Post #011 - Chapter and Verse

I almost didn't get around to writing a blog post this Monday. Good thing I had to come in and check on some jobs that were running. Not much happening; Matt's on holidays this week, so I managed to catch up to him on the SETHI spectrum-splitting task. The database now contains over 15 million spectra. Eric went over to the other building to see if we had a group meeting, and he said he'd call if there was one. He never called, but came back later and said there was no real meeting but they did talk about a lot of stuff anyway. So that sounds like a meeting to me. Anyway, after consulting with the gurus at Arecibo, it does appear that the spurious signals causing problems in the SETI@home multibeam application are due to radar, even though they don't have a totally regular periodicity. It must have something to do with a variable recovery time from when the receiver saturates.

My 108th SETHI datacube got made today, so that puts me at 75% complete. I also found some more bugs in the code that we use to process our GALFA data, so I expect my next set of datacubes for that project to look a lot better. We had some days way back in October & November of 2005 where the DAC levels were not set right, causing the spectrum to have too narrow a bandpass, so the signal at the outer frequencies of our science band were too high. Here's an example of what I'm talking about (plus a nasty RFI spike to boot):


Anyway, we want to blank out the days where this happens, but the code to generate "blank" time epochs had some problems, which I fixed today. I expected my new cube to be ready when I got in this evening after watching hockey, but it's still got 6 hours to go! So I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to see the improvement.

Arecibo is definitely stopping observations starting next week. They are going to take ALFA right down from the platform while they repaint the apparatus. I'll see if any of my colleagues at the observatory can take some pictures of the maintenance during the outage.

Thanks for the News Kevin . . . omg!!! (arEcibo goin' down . . .) ;)
> hopE you'rE wEll . . .

I'm great, thanks. I was in Sacramento all day for a field trip with my son's class. I just came in to check on things and I see that my 111th SETHI cube finished earlier today, and #112 will be done in about 20 minutes. 7/9 of the way done! Mmmm, 7 of 9....(ok, that was geeky; I never used to watch Star Trek).

The Arecibo shutdown got moved a week to April 15, but ALFA will be taken down from the receiver platform a few days earlier. So a few more nights to collect some SETI@home & GALFA data. I wasn't expecting this extension, so I planned a little vacation starting Saturday. Just going to Southern California for a few days. Then when I get back I'll take care of this new Arecibo data. Might not start a new blog until midweek next week, but given the small amount of responses I'm sure it won't be missed.

I would guess that there is quite a bit of Alfa data for the end-users to crunch now, even though some has been processed during the Beta phase. The questions are, How much longer will Alfa data be in Beta phase trials and how long will the Alfa receiver not be collecting data because of the refurbishment/repainting of the Alfa receiver interface at Arecibo?
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@ Byron - Thank You Kindly . . . so - *WHEN* i succeed @ what i am presently succeedin' with - in due respect to mi case files @ Congressional Inquiry Level - i hereby announce that

"i shall insure that Byron's / Kevin's & Berkeley's Dreams are met with the Appropriate Monies - which i shall see to . . ."

FULLY FAVORABLE

Dr. Kevin Douglas, Postdoctoral research associate
Born in the town of Penticton , in the Okanagan Valley , British Columbia , Canada

Kevin is a radio astronomer, specializing in the study of the interstellar medium.
He is an expert at observing Galactic hydrogen with the Arecibo multibeam receiver called ALFA,
to which SETI@home recently installed its new data recorder.

Hi Kevin

if I had a dream come true ... it would be:
Let's put up a whopping huge radio Telescope
solar powered on the far side of the moon
so Earth's communications , would not interfere
make it automated
turn it on and let's do some radio astronomy :-)