Two Good Projects That I Don't Have Time For

In both cases, a sufficiently promising initial study should be enough to
land a starting grant from NASA or the NSF.

I - Feasibility Study of a Portable Radio Telescope

Identify the largest Seyfert galaxy in the sky, and decide if it is
possible to resolve it with a backyard radio antenna made from the largest
commercially available, home tv satellite dish. If it is, sort the list of
active galactic nuclei by size and identify all other resolvable ones.
Find the RF band in which AGN are brightest, and research the availability
of reasonably priced RF detectors in that band. If none are available, try
to find an RF band in which reasonably priced detectors are available, but
AGN are not too dim to provide useful images.

II - Design Study of a Miniature Interferometer

Write a design paper for an optical interferometer based on a pair of 30
inch, off-the-shelf telescopes. Design or otherwise identify the interface
optics necessary to connect the telescopes' eyepieces to a signal conduit
of fiber optic cable. Invent the tuning mechanism required to match the
optical path lengths of the two signal lines with a sufficient degree of
accuracy to produce a useful interferogram. The tuning mechanism should be
based on a calibrated screw thread of 40 threads per inch, and installed at
the fiber-optic interface of one of the two eyepieces.

In article , John Schutkeker wrote:

In both cases, a sufficiently promising initial study should be enough to
land a starting grant from NASA or the NSF.

I - Feasibility Study of a Portable Radio Telescope

Identify the largest Seyfert galaxy in the sky, and decide if it is
possible to resolve it with a backyard radio antenna made from the largest
commercially available, home tv satellite dish.

It won't be. The diffraction limit is around lambda / D radians,
for wavelength lambda and antenna diameter D. At say Ku band (~13 GHz,
2.3 cm wavelength), and a 3-meter antenna (pretty big!), you could
about resolve a moon-sized (30 arc minute) disk. The nearest Seyfert
I can think of is M77, at about 7 arc minutes diameter for the whole
galaxy; its active nucleus is far far smaller.

In article ,
John Schutkeker writes:
I - Feasibility Study of a Portable Radio Telescope

Identify the largest Seyfert galaxy in the sky, and decide if it is
possible to resolve it with a backyard radio antenna made from the largest
commercially available, home tv satellite dish.

What do you want to resolve, the galaxy or the nucleus? For big
galaxies, arcminute resolution would suffice. This corresponds to
about 700 meters at 20 cm wavelength. An amateur interferometer
might be made this big, but I doubt there would be enough signal for
an actual detection. Going to higher frequency makes the spacing
smaller, but the signal also gets smaller.

Resolving the nucleus is a job for VLBI and still isn't easy (big
dishes, continental scales). See, for example, Greenhill et
al. 1995, ApJ 440, 619.

II - Design Study of a Miniature Interferometer

Write a design paper for an optical interferometer based on a pair of 30
inch, off-the-shelf telescopes.

Sounds a lot like Michaelson's standalone interferometer on
Mt. Wilson. His successful measurements were done with an
interferometric adaptation of the Hooker telescope. The standalone
interferometer was supposed to be a bigger and better follow-on, but
he never did get it to work properly.

I'm not sure why you would want to use fiber optics. The key is to
maintain the path difference of the objectives while still tracking
at the sidereal rate. I've been told Michaelson's problem was
flexure. Smaller telescopes and baselines would make the job a lot
easier. This might just barely be possible for an amateur, depending
on how big a device you want, but sky conditions where it could be
used are very rare.

Professional interferometers these days use laser-controlled delay
lines. I think this is well out of the range most amateurs could
manage.

--
Steve Willner Phone 617-495-7123
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
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