First Signs of the NTPCkr

Just to show some non-zero amount of progress on the Near Time Persistency Checker (a.k.a. the NTPCkr, pronounced "nitpicker"), I added some new fields to the science status page showing previous signals found where the telescope is currently pointing:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/sci_status.html

This isn't all that scientifically useful, but it is kind of interesting, and shows the basic guts of the NTPCkr are working - i.e. given a single "pixel" on the sky, show some basic up-to-the-minute stats about what we've seen there so far.

Please note that:

1. We divide the sky up into millions of such "pixels," and each contains anywhere from 0 to roughly 100000 signals of varying type. Don't get excited or depressed about any of these number you see.

2. If you watch the page, you'll note that "multiplets" (groups of similar signals of similar frequency seen over multiple observations) are rather common. So don't get too excited about those, either. This is all BEFORE we remove RFI and other garbage from the database.

3. I still haven't yet fixed known precession errors (which I mentioned before in recent tech news items) so the coordinates are slightly off, anyway, but nevertheless this gives you a rough idea of what we got.

The current NTPCkr work is focused on getting this running in near-real-time. This is the whole point of this extended project, as opposed to doing yet another one-fell-swoop kind of analysis which is painful and requires a month of focused manpower to do, which is why such things happen every few years. The grand hope of the NTPCkr is to be giving us good results every day.

More news as we progress, I guess...

- Matt
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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

thanks for the Info

Greetings from Germany NRW
Ulli

2. If you watch the page, you'll note that "multiplets" (groups of similar signals of similar frequency seen over multiple observations) are rather common. So don't get too excited about those, either. This is all BEFORE we remove RFI and other garbage from the database.

I just made this thread sticky, because, as suggested, this should be of high general interest.

- Matt

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-- BOINC/SETI@home network/web/science/development person
-- "Any idiot can have a good idea. What is hard is to do it." - Jeanne-Claude

the table needs more explanation for us neophytes. for example, how can arecibo be currently pointing anywhere; by the time one reads the table the earth has moved. two bits.

the table needs more explanation for us neophytes. for example, how can arecibo be currently pointing anywhere; by the time one reads the table the earth has moved. two bits.

I think I cleared up that text: the coordinates are changing all the time as you point out, but these readings are taken every ten minutes for our display purposes.

And yes, there will be more useful descriptions at some point, especially as we get more interesting stats up on the site.

- Matt

Thanks so much Matt, your news has been long awaited. Good on you!

Of course. That's why SETI@home requires as much computation as it does - we're scanning the same frequency/time space over and over again assuming a kajillion different doppler shifts. We don't know where the signal is coming from, at what angle, and when, so we need to compensate for that.

- Matt

Hi Matt, i'am glad with your explanation, doesn't these signals, due to the earth's rotation, gives all kinds off 'DOPPLER Effects'. Or are those movements to complex to 'call' them so?

Matt...I have been one of the more vocal among the users about the lack of any analysis being done. I am now more proud than ever to say that I am a member of the community crunching Seti@home.

Thank you for getting NTPCkr ( or at least the beginnings of it ) going.
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Meanwhile 120 days later...?
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And I remember a time when Matt said there was a danger of running out of work. Why work on the analysis of the data when they can spend their time with a new CUDA project that will crunch data 3X faster - data that still won't be analyzed.
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