Does anyone know what a extraterrestrial signal will look like on the Seti@home screen saver.
Being a nerd, I watch them, then it dawned on me, don't know what I'm looking at, or for.
Please help, I want to know when to be excited............

Welcome to the boards Sir!
I don't know, I don't run the screen saver. I must
say that I am one of them folks who is in to mega
crunching of Seti data.
You just may love it in here.

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Thanks for the welcome, just hope someone out there has an answer for me, haven't had any sleep for over a week.

Don't start watching the screen saver, it can be addictive.

Keep crunchin......

Thanks for the welcome, just hope someone out there has an answer for me, haven't had any sleep for over a week.

Don't start watching the screen saver, it can be addictive.

Keep crunchin......

Yes, it can be addictive.......

Welcome aboard, David.

You might get more and better responses by posting your Screensaver question over in the Number Crunching or Seti Science sections of the Forum.

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Donald
Infernal Optimist / Submariner, retired

Thanks Donald, if I can drag myself away from the screen saver, I will give it a go.

Josef Segur gave this explanation in Message 1535565:

For the Atropulse displays, the left to right time encompasses only 1.31072 milliseconds centered on the "Telescope time:" shown above. There are actually 32768 power values in that time, but for graphics purposes that has to be subsampled since displays aren't 32K pixels wide. The back to front Dispersion has 16 slightly different values, which causes the apparent spiky presentation.

For SETI@home v7 displays, the full 107.374 second duration is shown on the back to front time scale, and is subsampled as needed. The horizontal frequency scale covers the full 9765.625 Hz. of the WU, and again may be subsampled for presentation.

Given the totally different dimensions, comparing displays from the different apps isn't really meaningful. Perhaps close observation of those displays might lead to recognition of something important, but it should be understood that not all the data analyzed is displayed. If a special version of Astropulse were built which actually displayed all data chunks for 5 seconds each, processing would take over 100 days. For SaH v7 which covers more data for each display a similarly modified app would only take 11.44 days to complete a task at angle range 0.42.
Joe

I have highlighted the most important bits explaining that watching the screen saver isn't really going to help you find much of anything.

From the about page:

FREQUENCY-TIME-POWER GRAPH

Here is where you can observe the graphical representation of the fast fourier transforms as they are calculated. Frequency runs along the horizontal x-axis, power along the vertical y-axis and time along the in/out z-axis. Here you may note the difference between the different frequency resolution FFT's. For a resolution of 0.075 Hz you will notice that we only do 8 FFT's to cover our 107 seconds of data. This will look different than the 0.14 Hz resolution where we do 16 FFT's. Everytime we reduce the frequency resolution by 1/2 (doubling the bandwidth) we get twice the time resolution (we do twice the number of FFT's). At the final resolution of 1200 Hz, we get a time resolution of 0.008192 seconds which also means that we do a total of 131,072 FFT's just for this one graph! This allows detection of fairly short pulses, but the frequency measurement cannot be as precise, and the sensitivity to find continuous signals is reduced.
The colors you see in the graph signify absolutely nothing. They were used only for aesthetic purposes. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

A significant extraterrestrial signal may not be visible in this graph as it may be masked by all the natural noise around it. So, if you see something, don't get overly excited, it's probably just a strong source somewhere local, or a satellite passing overhead. On the average we look at the same part of the sky every 3 to 6 months, so it will get re-checked at that time for the same strong signal.

Welcome to crunching! And to the boards! :)

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Member of the People Encouraging Niceness In Society club.

Welcome to the project. Remember that Seti is listening for extra terrestial signals. Instead of watching the screen saver try headphones. :-)

Think the people with the power are already doing that, but they call it white noise.
I'll carry on with the screensaver.
thanks anyway, all suggestions are welcome :-}

It is almost impossible to tell a real ET signal from other things unless it repeats on different nights. There is post processing done on possible signals to see if there is a repeat on a different night, so you can't really see whether it is a real signal or not. If it is too powerful, it is terrestrial in origin. If it is too weak, it is just background noise. So it is the medium signals that you are looking for -- ones that have a shape that follows the transit of the telescope across the sky.

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BOINC WIKI

You'll know an alien when you see one ... they are kinda small and green with big heads.

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A lot of them hang around "Walmart".......

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A lot of them hang around "Walmart".......

I've never seen a "Walmart" but they sound like scary places.

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Thanks for the welcome, just hope someone out there has an answer for me, haven't had any sleep for over a week.

Don't start watching the screen saver, it can be addictive.

Keep crunchin......

Hi David. Lovely to meet you :) I must say I used to stare at the screensaver for AGES when I first started at seti. It IS very addictive. To cure myself of what was fast becoming a mindless addiction, I got addicted to the boards instead :) You have been warned! :)

If you get tired of waiting for ET's signal, plan a trip to Roswell, New Mexico. ET hangs out all over the place downtown on the main drag. Make a special trip to the McDonalds at night :-))

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If you get tired of waiting for ET's signal, plan a trip to Roswell, New Mexico. ET hangs out all over the place downtown on the main drag. Make a special trip to the McDonalds at night :-))

Sigh.

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BOINC WIKI

I like the saver too so I got it in my siggy. (^;

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I use the screensaver as a TV, much more interesting as the real TV which I never watch:)

I was told the screensaver is really representative. That makes it even more intriguing if you ask me. I wouldn't know how an alien signal would look on it tho:(

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rOZZ
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